MTV Turns 20 Today (Aug 1, 2001)

On August 1, 1981, six words changed American culture forever: "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll!" With that short declaration, a new generation was born - the "MTV generation."

That day, the chart toppers on the Billboard Top 40 at the time included Kenny Rogers, Kim Carnes, Lionel Richie, Eddie Rabbitt, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Foreigner, Journey, and many other adult contemporary acts populated the pop music landscape at that time. Within two years, innovative new acts both from the U.S. and abroad such as The Police, David Bowie, Rick Springfield, The Eurythmics, U2, The Cure, and countless other new wave, punk, and youth-oriented acts supplanted the older acts on the pop charts, thanks or no thanks to MTV according to your musical tastes.

MTV's timing was perfect because pop culture was ready for it. At that time punk rock was dying, disco was gasping its last breath and John Lennon had been shot by an assassin's bullet.

MTV, which turns 20 today has proved itself to be the little music channel that could. It started modestly by airing the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a novelty video by a British band no one here had ever heard of, and quickly grew into a sociological phenomenon.

From breaking new bands - including almost singlehandedly introducing the entire category of rap - to popularizing reality TV long before the Survivors ever ate their first rat, MTV has been a defining force.

This week, the New York-based network will get its due, with a birthday concert Wednesday at the Hammerstein Ballroom, featuring old and new MTV favorites including Aerosmith, Billy Idol, Salt-N-Pepa, Bon Jovi, Kid Rock, Janet Jackson, Blink-182 and P. Diddy (Mariah Carey bowed out due to illness.)

Madonna used MTV to challenge the conventional image of the female pop star and of women in general. Without artists like her, there would have been none of the so-called "girl-power" bands.

IF you're among the original Generation Xers - you know who you are, you 30-somethings - you can relive your youth by tuning in to MTV starting at 8 a.m. today. The network has scheduled a 12-hour block of music videos from the past and present.

Aateurish videos dominated MTV's playlist in the early days. Best example: Big Country's video for "In a Big Country" - the band members rode around on all-terrain vehicles for no apparent reason. How about The Clash playing "Rock the Casbah" with a drilling oil well in the background?

As MTV's audience grew, so did the budgets. Early videos could cost as little as a few thousand dollars to produce. By 1989 Madonna was the first person to spend one million dollars to express herself in a music video. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. A few years later Michael and Janet Jackson's Scream video rolled out with a price tag of more than seven million dollars.

MTV introduced new bands with the show "120 Minutes" to remind us that there were bands beyond the Billboard chart-toppers.

The first crop of VJs were J.J. Jackson, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Nina Blackwood and Martha Quinn. At first, MTV's five original VJs were broadcasting to an audience of only one million. A year later, eight million more wanted their MTV and signed on.

When MTV arrived on the scene 20 years ago August 1, its tag line was "You'll never look at music the same way again." By 1983, everybody was thinking video music instead of just music. That was a very fast penetration for any cultural phenomenon.

At first, MTV had absolutely no noticable inpact on the pop charts. Many popular acts of today such as Rogers or Ross didn't make videos. So MTV hunted deep down for videos of any musical act worth putting on the air to fill up their 24 hour space.

Never before had there been an around-the-clock TV show about music. With 24 hours to fill, MTV showed virtually any video they got. The first MTV video to hit the airwaves came from an obscure British band. That first song, ironically titled Video Killed the Radio Star, was followed by Pat Benatar's "You Better Run" and Rod Stewart's "She Won't Dance."

The bands that had happened, for whatever reason, to sit down and produce a music video either before MTV started or in that first year-and-a-half, suddenly had this influence on the music scene that was all out of proportion to their popularity by any other measure. After a year, acts such as Billy Idol, Adam and the Ants, A Flock of Seagulls, and others crossed over to mainstream Top 40 after first being exposed on MTV; these are acts that would have never broken out on Top 40 or rock and roll radio back in the early 80's when the pop stations were playing cookie-cutter A/C music. If it weren't for the videos, the music you're hearing on the 80's oldies stations would be nothing but soft rock and love songs.

Once MTV began, teens gravitated to it instantly, and those without cable clamored for it (as in "I want my MTV!" ú another well-chosen early network slogan). All of a sudden, MTV became the in thing you must have on a cable system. Black acts playing funk, rap, dance, and rock such as Rick James, Run DMC, Michael Jackson, and Prince were featured more prominently on mainsteam Top 40 radio once MTV stopped avoiding black artists' videos.

MTV was to video music in the early 80's as to what AM radio was in the late 50's and what FM radio was in the 70's, that is, break out the acts to the public for them to absorb, judge, burn-in, and decide if they're hits or misses. MTV opened up many musical styles to people who would have never heard them on mainstream Top 40 radio such as new wave, Euro romantic, Aussie rock, post-70's punk, rap, hip hop, modern dance, big hair rock bands, and even Weird Al Yankovic and Dr. Demento along the way.

MTV also affected the look of movies, commercials, and television programs. The TV show that led the way was NBC's prime time show that began with the working title "MTV Cops" as requested by the late great programmer Brandon Tartikoff, and evolved into Miami Vice, which was, itself, a trend setter in men's fashions as MTV was in fashion. Pastel sport coats over a T-shirt; beltless pants; loafers; stubble. That's the Miami Vice look.

Mike Post, a TV composer whose work spans "The Rockford Files," "Hill Street Blues" (with his late partner, Pete Carpenter) and "NYPD Blue," says the "Miami Vice" format of melding pop music with literally arresting visual images was "really, really seminal."

He pinpoints the first major use of pop songs in a dramatic score much earlier ú in 1967, with the Simon & Garfunkel soundtrack for Mike Nichols' "The Graduate." But, he says, the use of Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" ú first in 1983's "Risky Business" and the following year in the two-hour telemovie pilot of "Miami Vice" ú rewrote the rules.

"That's the quintessential example of how it's done really, really well," Post says. "But you know what? Any night of the week, you can turn on TV and see how it's done terrible.

"It's sort of like being a pro baseball player. Geez, if you bat .300, you're doing fantastic. Well, I think the use of songs as score in television is battling about .075."

Post says that the marketing of songs on TV shows has gotten to the point where ú on the WB in particular ú artists whose music is heard on the show receive plugs at the end of the programs.

"It's called the music business," he notes.

And despite those reservations, he gives MTV high marks for its influence on regular broadcast television.

"It isn't even like a 70-30 kind of deal," he says. "It's 100% good. It made more people aware of how music can co-exist with visuals."

But MTV, which transformed the Top 40 charts into a mostly youth-oriented genre, although it broke out the offbeat punk and synth bands, wasn't the first outlet to break out rap, dance, rock, and heavy metal; those genres belong to the fragmented radio genres such as soul, disco, and progessive rock stations.

Hip hop started in 1979 when "Rapper's Delight" first made the Billboard chart rounds, but MTV exploded rap in the late 80's with Run DMC covering Aerosmith's "Walk This Way", introducing a weekly "Yo! MTV Raps" that led to the the successful mass marketing of an entire urban subculture crossing over to the young white audience. A lot of people saw and heard acts on MTV that would have been played on radio only on the black stations. The showe gave mainstream exposure to artists including Public Enemy, N.W.A. and Run-DMC.

Videos were originally used as marketing tools for syndicated TV shows featuring videos to publicize the label's acts. Programs such as "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert" and "America's Top Ten with Casey Kasem" featured videos of pop acts in the late 70's and early 80's. A hit video, the thinking goes, is a cheaper way to promote an artist to more people. Videos are standard today, largely because they're a product MTV taught consumers to enjoy.

Over the last 20 years, MTV has made a mark on pop culture as visible as Britney Spears's bellybutton. Movies with pop movie soundtracks are almost a given nowadays. Mid 80's movies were already showing some MTV influence such as "Purple Rain" and "Footloose."

Detractors said it wouldn't last one year, and now it looks like it will never go away.

On Aug. 1, 1981: MTV launches its maiden broadcast with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." By the end of the year, Fortune magazine named MTV "Product of the Year."

In 1983, MTV broke ground with black pop music by airing Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" and Prince's "Little Red Corvette" and "1999" after being influenced to change its white-only video policy.

In September 1984: The first "MTV Video Music Awards" show aired from Radio City Music Hall in New York featuring a memorable Madonna dancing to her future #1 hit "Like a Virgin." The following July 1985: MTV televised the massive "Live Aid" concert in its entirety.

In August 1988: "Yo! MTV Raps" debuts. In January 1990: "MTV Unplugged" debuts with acoustic performances by Squeeze, Syd Straw and Elliot Easton from the Cars.

The first decade of MTV was memorable, but the second decade of MTV was the one that many people are severlely criticizing, when MTV dropped many video music hours in favor of so-called reality and music culture programming such as the "Real World", "MTV Town Hall," "Road Rules," "Spring Break" breaks, "Celebrity Death Match", "Sifl and Olly," "Undressed," "Cribs," "TRL", and "Jackass", which was the subject of controversy when young kids were injuring themselves by trying to imitate what they saw on the program.

The second decade had their bright spots, though few and far between, such as "Beavis and Butthead," "Choose or Lose" voter-awareness campaign, "Daria," and that's about it. Sure they launched M2, or MTV2, featuring music videos, but why? Couldn't they have just kept the music on MTV and launched a pop culture channel instead?

Not everyone still wants their MTV, to paraphrase the music-video channel's early marketing slogan.Many artists shared their comments about the channel that's supposed to be playing Music instead of talk talk talk.

Pearl Jam's Matt Cameron: "I think MTV is the worst invention in the history of mankind."

Iggy Pop: "The bad part is that your average MTV star is like (a character on) 'I Love Lucy.' Britney Spears is Lucille Ball, and that makes Eminem Ricky Ricardo. They've become TV stars. That's weird to me, because they now occupy places that TV stars who were really square once did."

David Gray: "What happened to the music? Maybe they should just call it TV."

Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood: "MTV is very traditional now. It still makes me think that music videos may have peaked (in 1986) with Peter Gabriel's 'Sledgehammer.' MTV is like an ad that goes on too long; at least a commercial is only 20 seconds."

Tricky: "When I grew up, before MTV, music was about complaining and being a rebel. Now it's about looking good on TV."

Barenaked Ladies' Steven Page: "It's amazing the impact you have when you get played on MTV. . . . (But) MTV's playlist has gotten so small that it's nothing but boy bands, metal and Aerosmith -- the only band that is immune to trends."

Jazz star Chick Corea: "The way MTV videos are made has become such a cliche. . . . The whole style of most videos seems like a commercial rather than a work of art, because they use only one technique, which is fast cuts and edits that never stay on one thing. After a while, it becomes unnerving."

Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry: "MTV has got a lot to answer for, hasn't it? MTV's had too much emphasis on the visual, and on groups being manufactured for the way they looked on TV, rather than the music they made. . . . There'll always be good and bad in everything, and I guess you'll see more bad on MTV."

Wellwater Conspiracy's John McBain: "MTV is teen-agers being fed what teen-agers are supposed to be and look like, and it's run by old farts who are completely out of touch."

Some of the best videos ever made:

"Thriller" - Michael Jackson
"Vogue" - Madonna
"Sledgehammer" - Peter Gabriel
"Addicted To Love" - Robert Palmer
"Express Yourself" - Madonna
"Justify My Love" - Madonna
"Papa Don't Preach" - Madonna
"Erotica" - Madonna
"This Note's For You" - Neil Young
"Billie Jean" - Michael Jackson
"Take On Me" - a-ha
"Smells Like Nirvana" - Weird Al Yankovic
"Eat It" - Weird Al Yankovic
"Brilliant Disguise" - Bruce Springsteen
"Straight Up" - Paula Abdul

It's interesting how no other entity in television, no network, no cable service has ever had a generation named after it. You don't hear about the Food Channel generation or the Golf Channel generation.

There were these superstars like Michael Jackson and Madonna, who reached unprecedented, unparalleled heights. What MTV did was for the first time give one big central outlet for music, and so rather than having to go radio station to radio station, there was one big hit that became the primary outlet for new music and new bands.

MTV gave advertisers new ideas about editing and movie directors a new vocabulary. And its impact on network TV may be stronger now than ever before.

But today, when MTV is entering its third decade, people are wondering what happened to the M in MTV?

Today, MTV is seen in 350 million homes and in 70 percent of the world. It generates reported annual revenues of $3 billion. The music is still there, but not enough, say the channel's critics.

Where's the videos? On TRL if you can find time to watch it opposite shows you rather watch such as West Wing and Survivor. Is today's teen culture no longer interested in music anymore? Do they really prefer talk shows over music nowadays?

Today's alternative rock and roll is a far cry more unlistenable than the kind of rock MTV was playing in its early days. Hard metal punk whatever garbage rules the airwaves today, making the 70's punk bands like Black Flag and Sex Pistols sound like Neil Diamond and Kenny Rogers.

MTV's musical tastes are nowadays strictly commercial instead of innovative like it was in its early days. Gone are the offbeat fun videos like Bow Wow Wow, The Cars, and The Clash. Instead, MTV plays pop trash like Eminem, Christina Aguliera, Backstreet Boys, and some nameless skate rat bands that all sound alike that you're hearing on the so-called alternative rock stations today. MTV is no longer alternative; neither are today's alternative stations; they're alternative in name only, that is, mainstream rock for this generation of youngsters.

Todays pop alternative rock are some horrible Van Halen rip off bands that come and go so fast that nobody really cares about them. Is this is what Alternative music has come to?

Among those whose lives have definitely changed for the worst in the MTV era are any artists over the age of 25 who don't happen to be pretty enough to make the network's playlist.

Thanks to MTV, gone are the days when a gawky teen equipped only with a guitar, a rebellious spirit and authentic musical ability could rise to the top.

On today's MTV, Joey Ramone and Pete Townshend would likely be ineligible for airplay.

MTV has lost its cutting edge of music and is firmly establised on the corporate cookie-cutter pop sound as predictable as Radio Disney (some critics dubbed them Minus TV and Radio Dismal.)

The cable network loves to boast about its influence on youth, citing the widespread adoption among its young viewers of the styles it showcases on its programs and videos. Big deal. Why don't they just play the video music?

MTV used to play videos in the early days that catered to the rebel rock youth of my late teenage and early adult generation (the college-age crowd between 1979 and 1984) that pretty much made statements of their own and were not influenced by corporate suits to sanitize their raw alternative sounds. Nowadays, today's bands are so corporate controlled that their sounds are indistingusiable from another; the bands all sound like Nirvana or Backstreet or Spice Girls. Where's the innovation? MTV is as bad as corporate radio today.

The network seems to believe with all its heart that it has remained through the years on the cutting edge in discovering and nurturing new musical talent.

Well, I'm sure there is no shortage of new musical talent out there who would be glad to refute that claim.

They will tell you that access to the MTV promotional machinery is available only to mainstream acts backed by the world's most powerful entertainment conglomerates. Why? Because the multimillion-dollar video revolution MTV wrought has priced all but the groups sponsored by the biggest corporations out of the market for exposure on MTV.

And how does MTV use its power as the gatekeeper of pop music?

It plays Eminem videos for months on end in the middle of the afternoon for your pre-teen kids to absorb until they can't resist running out to the mall to buy the Eminem CD with all the four-letter words that MTV bleeped out.

MTV is fixated on the teenage viewer instead of the slightly older viewer (18-34) that they originally aimed their music videos to back in 1981.

Videos used to be all about the music and visuals; now it's all about selling the records and looking good, as well as starting controversy, instead of simply just creating the music and videos free of corporate suit influence. Today's videos are completely unwatchable.

MTV "died" in 1992 when they began reality programming and it snowballed so much that nobody can watch the videos on MTV anymore.

Now to add insult to injury, MTV is now airing an exclusive soap opera? Give me a break!

MTV is dead. Long live MTV.

MTV. 1981-1992.

Music-Free TV. 1992-???.