Dec 14

MTV

MTV

 
MTV  (an initialism of Music Television) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by Viacom, Inc.  Launched on August 1, 1981, the original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by television personalities known as “video jockeys”, or VJs.  In its early years, MTV’s main target demographic were young adults; but today, MTV’s programming is primarily targeted at adolescents and teenagers.  As of February 2015, approximately 93,240,000 American households (80.1% of households with television) received MTV.   (More from Wikipedia)
 
 
Malcolm McLaren – the musical entrepreneur best known for managing Sex Pistols – assembled the musicians in the band Adam and the Ants (after Adam Ant became a solo artist and also escaped with the band name) with a teenaged Anglo-Burmese singer dubbed Annabella Lwin.  As Bow Wow Wow, they recorded the old Strangeloves song “I Want Candy”; coupled with an early MTV video, this song became a worldwide hit in 1982.  
 
(May 2012)
 
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Basically, all I remember about the 1980’s band Steel Breeze is their name; the name is taken from a lyric in a Pink Floyd song, “Shine On You Crazy Diamond”.  I remember an interview with Steel Breeze one time (it must have been on MTV) where they were asked about their name; and they rather sheepishly said that they were really enamored with Pink Floyd at the time, making it clear that by then, they wish they had chosen another name. 
  
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The comic-punk band Green Jellö had an unexpected hit on MTV with “Three Little Pigs”, a retelling of the nursery rhyme The Three Little Pigs (despite bargain-basement production values).  
  
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Well, somebody had to introduce some comic relief into all of this grimness, and the Dead Milkmen certainly fit the bill.  They managed to come up with a hit song on college radio, “Punk Rock Girl”; the video on MTV was filled with bloopers and out-takes and shots of a green Mohawk waving back and forth.  
 
(July 2012)
 
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Back when MTV and VH1 used to play music videos, and when I wasn’t watching anything else, I would often have one of those channels on, with my videocassette recorder at the ready, in case a video came on of a song that I really liked.  Particularly when there was a song in “heavy rotation” that I really wanted, I would often have the VCR already cued up, on “hold”, so that I would miss as little of the video as possible.  Sometimes I would get lucky, and I would already be recording a song when another one came on that I wanted as well. 
 
That happened one time with “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age.  The time was back in the Garage Rock Revival period of the early 2000’s, when the White Stripes, the Hives, the Strokes, and several other great retro bands were really getting established.  I hadn’t heard the song before, but the beat sounded good, so I left the recorder running.  That song got to be a real favorite of mine, and I was particularly thrilled when I later recognized Dave Grohl – former drummer for Nirvana and front man for Foo Fighters – on drums in the video (that’s a video cap from the “No One Knows” music video above). 
 
(December 2012)
 
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As punk rock and new wave rock ran its course, alternative rock started up in the 1980’s; and that also kept the popular music world rocking on into the 1990’s, even as other forms of music began intruding into rock’s hegemony, such as hip hop and country.  MTV had long since come to terms with rap music and hip hop, but their VJ’s were always chagrined when they kept having to report that the Number One album in the country was by Garth Brooks, probably the most successful crossover artist in popular music history. 
 
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Two other bands came along at about the same time with songs on MTV that I really liked; they even had similar names:  the Vines and the Hives.  At the annual MTV Music Video Awards telecast in 2002, the two bands had back-to-back performances that were simply wonderful.  As it turned out, it was just the one song on the Vines album, Highly Evolved that really had that garage-rock style, but the Hives kept releasing one great album after another.  Also, their live shows have been rated by Spin magazine as the 8th greatest ever.  The Black and White Album above is the only one by the Hives that I actually own, but I am sure looking hard for others. 
 
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Mick Farren wrote the liner notes to The Sound of San Francisco, which are entitled “Remember You Heard it Here First”.  They started out this way: 
 
     Everyone knows the old joke.
     Q  What do you call a drummer without a girlfriend? 
     A  Homeless 
 
Mick Farren was trying to make a point though with this old joke, and it was a poignant one; his liner notes continued:  “Maybe there was a utopian time when musicians could expect to support their survival by playing rock & roll, but I don’t recall so much as meeting anybody who could remember such a golden age.  Even cats with record deals must sometimes fall back on phonesales, breaking and entering, or find themselves doing 24 months for possession with intent to sell; and the girls might go out lap-dancing or dealing blackjack to make ends meet in hard times or moments of self-inflicted disaster.  Such has been the material reality of all but that highly publicized, but tiny one percent of rockers who find themselves elevated to MTV, witless stardom, and access to every vice known to man, woman, and several domestic animals.” 
 
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Nancy Reagan’s surprisingly successful “Just Say No” campaign had just about driven even marijuana back into the deep underground.  As an example, in case you’d forgotten, MTV censored the word “joint” in Tom Petty’s harmless 1994 hit song “You Don’t Know How It Feels”; and Warner Bros. Records refused to include the B-side of the single, “Girl on L.S.D.” on the accompanying hit album, Wildflowers. 
 
(January 2013)
 
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Scorpions for example were fairly prominent in the early days of MTV and had several hit songs in that period.  They are perhaps best known for their 1984 song “Rock You Like a Hurricane” that still gets a lot of play on oldies radio stations, but you might also remember “No One Like You” and the power ballad “Send Me an Angel”.  
 
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Speaking of Germans, I went into a long discussion of Neue Deutsche Welle (“German New Wave”) in my article on one of the coolest UARB’s of them all, Ja Ja Ja; and I never once mentioned the most successful of those bands:  Nena.  Their worldwide 1983 hit song “99 Luftballons” was in heavy rotation on MTV long before the English-language version, “99 Red Balloons” came along.  (The only English words in the original song were “Captain Kirk”). 
 
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Over the course of my appraisal career, I have valued properties in 26 states and 2 Canadian provinces.  As varied as it can be within the USA, Canada is a completely different place altogether to me.   

 

On that trip and occasionally at other times, I would get to see MuchMusic, the Canadian version of MTV (back when it was all about music videos of course).  

 

(April 2013)

 

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You might remember “We’re Not Gonna Take It” as a classic music video on MTV back in the day; as Wikipedia describes it:  “The song is notable for its popular music video directed by Marty Callner, with its emphasis on slapstick comedy, where a parent gets the worst of the band’s mischief.  Controversy arose when the depiction of the family in the video caused a public outcry long before the ‘explicit lyrics’ warning was placed on records, cassettes, and CD’s.  

This led to the formation of the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore (who later became Second Lady of the United States).  Mark Metcalf, the actor portraying the father in the video, had previously played   Neidermeyer, the ROTC student commander in National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978).  In a reference to his role in the film, Metcalf says in the video, ‘A Twisted Sister pin?  On your uniform?!’.  [Lead singer Dee] Snider himself can also be heard cursing and swearing the question ‘A pledge pin?  On your uniform?’ at the end of the song.” 

 

(June 2013/2)

 

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One track on the L7 album Bricks Are Heavy, “Pretend We’re Dead” received a lot of airplay and MTV exposure; the song peaked at #8 on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks charts. 

 

(December 2013)

 

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With their final album, Monster (1989), Fetchin Bones had mastered a sound that presaged the grunge sound that was to come in the following decade; but the band was always out of step.  In the beginning, they were alternative rock even before anyone really knew what that was, and their sound became the template for the riot grrrl movement as well.  Their albums are quite good; I used to see their videos occasionally on MTV’s late-night alternative-rock showcase 120 Minutes, and they were briefly college-radio favorites.  They should have been FM Radio hitmakers as well, though it never happened. 

 

(February 2014)

 

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By this time, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick were a couple; in January 1971, Slick gave birth to China Wing Kantner (Wing was her maiden name), who later became a veejay on MTV.  

 

(June 2014)
 
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When a long overdue retrospective of Joy Division called Substance finally came out in 1988, one of the songs, “Atmosphere” got to #34 on the British charts, and the Spartan music video that played on the MTV program 120 Minutes made a deep impression on me as well.    

 

(June 2014)

 

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Other bands that Man in the Woods mentions include Faith No More (who had a big MTV hit with “Epic”).  

 

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Judas Priest sounds like another band name with Satanic tinges, but actually, the phrase is sometimes used as a euphemism for the oath “Jesus Christ”.  The popular English heavy metal band formed in 1969 and is still going strong.  They are generally regarded as being one of the best in the business, with MTV ranking Judas Priest second on their list of “best metal bands”.  Wikipedia says of the band:  “Their influence, while mainly Rob Halford’s operatic vocal style (widely considered as one of the most unique vocalists in the genre) and the twin guitar sound of K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton, has been adopted by many bands.” 

 

Rob Halford is the first hard rock musician to come out as a gay man that I can recall, during an interview on MTV News in 1998. 

 

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The Sisters of Mercy (named for a well-known Irish religious order) was one of my favorite bands of the 1980’s alternative rock explosion, particularly their video of “This Corrosion” that I saw numerous times on the late-night MTV alternative rock showcase 120 Minutes.  (The extended version of “This Corrosion” on their album Floodland was not nearly so effective).  Andrew Eldritch is the only continuous member of the band (along with a drum machine called Doktor Avalanche that really is something special), though the grim visage of Patricia Morrison on the video for “This Corrosion” is at least as memorable as his own. 

 

(October 2014)

 

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The Rolling Stones were the “bad boys” of the British Invasion.  They played around with Satanic themes and imagery, most famously with their hit “Sympathy for the Devil”, and also their under-rated psychedelic album that had the unfortunate title of Their Satanic Majesties’ Request.  (From Wikipedia:  “The album’s title is a play on the ‘Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires ...’ text that appears inside a British passport.”)    

 

But even the Stones came up with a religious themed song a while back, or at least Mick Jagger did:  “God Gave Me Everything” was co-written by Mick and Christian rocker Lenny Kravitz (who also performed on the recording) and was included on his 2001 album, Very Best of Mick Jagger.  I remember seeing the video many years ago back when you’d see those on MTV from time to time.  

 

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The Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album that I have, Tender Prey (1988) is their sixth album.  I was introduced to Nick Cave through the video for the opening track on this album, “The Mercy Seat” that I saw several times on the MTV late show 120 Minutes. 

 

(November 2014)

 

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Remarkably, the Crawdaddys filmed their performance of another Bo Diddley song in 1978, “Cadillac”; this was a full three years before MTV signed on the air.  The film was made for a college Communications class that Mark Zadarnowski was attending. 

 

(January 2015/2)

 

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There are probably a lot of people who think of “Yesterday” as being the quintessential Beatles song.  It is certainly their most successful – from Wikipedia:  “It remains popular today with more than 2,200 cover versions and is one of the most covered songs in the history of recorded music.  ‘Yesterday’ was voted the best song of the 20th century in a 1999 BBC Radio 2 poll of music experts and listeners and was also voted the No. 1 pop song of all time by MTV and Rolling Stone magazine the following year.  In 1997, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.  Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) asserts that it was performed over seven million times in the 20th century alone.” 

 

(June 2015)

 

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Shakespear’s Sister, Hormonally Yours – Shakespear’s Sister (note the missing “e”) is composed of Siobhan Fahey, a former member of Bananarama, and Marcella Detroit, who was the backing vocalist for Eric Clapton in the late 1970’s.  When I was living in New York, there was a channel on our local cable TV network called Video Jukebox.  There was a number that you could call and order your video, for which you were charged a dollar or so.  While you punched in the numbers on your telephone to order the video, those numbers would show up on the TV screen if you had that channel on, and that sure was cool.  Video Jukebox showed a lot of videos not available on MTV or VH1; after awhile, it was mostly rap and hip hop videos, but there were a lot of rock numbers early on.  That channel is where I frequently saw the video of their hit song “Stay”, a Top 5 hit on both sides of the Atlantic; the first half features tender singing from Marcella Detroit followed by unexpectedly menacing vocals by Siobhan Fahey.  This, their second album (from 1991) includes that song and numerous other engaging performances.
 
(December 2015)
 
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One of the great things about the heyday of MTV is that you never knew what great sounds would hit you next. I think I was on a business trip somewhere when I first saw the masterful rock video for the Deee-Lite song “Groove is in the Heart”, and I was simply flabbergasted at what I was seeing. Swirling colors, wild costumes, Yellow-Brick-Road–style marching, shots of legendary guest musician Bootsy Collins of Parliament-Funkadelic, tiny corner photos of the bandmembers – they really didn’t miss a trick in what they were doing. I didn’t even really know what kind of music this was, but at least in retrospect, it reminded me of the golden age of psychedelic soul in the late 1960’s. Their debut album, World Clique was equally infectious throughout.  
Surprisingly, the impact of Deee-Lite on the music world was mainly limited to “Groove is in the Heart”. Everyone expected the band’s lead vocalist Lady Miss Kier to become a music and fashion icon (she certainly has the name for it), but as I remember it, even on MTV, she kept a fairly low profile. 
(March 2016)

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The first rap song that I remember liking is “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.  I first heard it as a video, probably on the USA Network’s Night Flight program and others like it that showcased cutting-edge music videos.  The song came out in 1982, and I likely saw it around that time period.  (MTV launched on August 1, 1981, but not everyone had it on their cable system right away, leading to the common chant:  “I want my MTV!”).  
 
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An early example is one of the first big hits by Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”, where most of the vocals are sung much faster than the beat of the music; it is taken from their third album, Toys in the Attic (1975).  A decade later, Run-D.M.C. included a remake of “Walk This Way” on their album Raising Hell (1986), with Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith sitting in on vocals and guitar, respectively.  The two groups also collaborated on a video that was in heavy rotation on MTV.  This was one of the first times that rock music and rap music were melded together.
 
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The Fat Boys were pretty hard to miss in the early days of rap music, not only because of their prodigious weight, but also due to their high-profile cover of “The Twist” that featured Chubby Checker, who had originally recorded the mega-hit “The Twist”.  Years before the Yo! MTV Raps program debuted in 1988, the Fat Boys were featured in one of MTV’s earliest commercials.
 
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In the wake of the gangsta rap era, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince – Jeff Townes and Will Smith, respectively – were one of the first groups to try to tone things down with messages more suitable for teens.  Their second album, He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper (1988) was a multi-platinum smash; the charming video for their hit song, “Parents Just Don’t Understand” was in heavy rotation on MTV.  The duo had had an earlier hit in the same vein called “Girls Ain’t Nothing but Trouble” (1986) while Will Smith was still in high school.
 
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Of more importance though is the ground-breaking song “Rapture” by Blondie – with a rap section that was performed by Deborah Harry – that was released in 1980 on their album Autoamerican.  As noted in Wikipedia, this was the first song to top the American charts that featured rap, and also the first rap video to be broadcast on MTV. 
 
(September 2016)
 
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Like most, I was introduced to Green Day with Dookie. I imagine that I found out about them through their music videos on MTV and/or VH1, as the rock-video era was winding down. As Wikipedia notes: “Dookie produced five hit singles for the band: ‘Longview’, ‘When I Come Around’, ‘Basket Case’, a re-recorded version of ‘Welcome to Paradise’, and the radio-only single ‘She’.” The whole album rocks though, not just the hits. 
I identified Green Day with the burgeoning alternative rock scene of that era; Nirvana’s landmark album Nevermind had come out about 2½ years earlier, but there were plenty of bands and artists that I had been digging from well back in the 1980’s, many that I found out about via the late-night MTV program 120 Minutes.  
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The name “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” has a long history in music and elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, there have been six previous uses of the phrase as a song or album name by everyone from David Cassidy to Smokie to Hanoi Rocks, beginning with a 1930’s standard called “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” – in all, there are 14 items listed on the phrase’s “disambiguation” page. Green Day created a combined rock video for “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” and “Holiday”; as mentioned in Wikipedia: “MTV’s Green Day Makes a Video described ‘Holiday’ as a party, and ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ as the subsequent hangover.” 
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Even as the traditional outlets for getting music out to the general public have waned, such as radio (first AM, and then FM) and MTV, the universe of musical groups has exploded into a tsunami of musicians that I probably could not keep up with even if I tried. Music videos have gotten so scarce on MTV that I have frequently seen “world premiere” broadcasts of new videos by major artists on Entertainment Tonight. 
In the post-MTV era, YouTube has become an important venue for new artists, although the blizzard of posted videos makes this a daunting task to say the least. Barely a decade old, YouTube – the second most popular website on earth (after Google) – has ballooned to the point that 400 hours of new videos are being uploaded every minute (as of February 2017). According to Wikipedia: “It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.” 
(June 2017)

Last edited: March 22, 2021