MTV and the Big 4-0

The road from Video Killed the Radio Star and Love Plus One to The Real World and Jersey Shore was a long for MTV. After the channel's first decade on the air, it stopped being an especially scenic one. Nevertheless, on the occasion of its 40th birthday, I'd rather praise MTV for what was so right about the early years than bury them for (and with) the nonsense that came later.

So much of my own musical taste was molded by those early years when British post-punk/new-wave imports were all over their airwaves, rubbing shoulders with more established artists like The Who, whose single You Better You Bet was one of the first 45s I ever bought. This was the result of one of pop culture's great happy accidents. Because there were relatively few music videos when MTV launched, particularly from American artists, the door was open for unconventional (to American ears) British bands. As original VJ Mark Goodman put it in the documentary series Soundbreaking, "By default we wound up being really progressive and really sort of ahead of our time."

A lot of those acts never caught on and many disbanded before they could build anything more than a cult following in the United States, but they still made an enduring impression. Four decades after seeing the video for Town Called Malice, The Jam remains my favorite UK band of the period over the more popular (and acclaimed) The Clash. They generated as much kick with three people as The Clash did with four, and Paul Weller's song-writing was better. Of course, it hardly mattered back then because I loved the video for Rock the Casbah as well.

I remember liking Marshall Crenshaw's lone Top 40 hit Someday, Someway on first hearing it, but seeing the video for Whenever You're on My Mind cemented him as an artist to watch for me. In the case of Squeeze, I suspect that the fandom that took root in America, fostered by videos like Black Coffee on Bed, played a part in their eventual reunion in the mid-1980s. Though Tempted remains their signature song and 1987's Hourglass wore out its welcome on the radio, it was nice to see the band get the hit single that eluded them the first time around.

Sometimes the MTV-driven hit turned out to be a fluke with very few indications of what the artist's future held. 'Til Tuesday's lead singer Aimee Mann had a voice to rival Christie Hynde and presence to spare. However, the synthesizer-heavy single Voices Carry didn't necessarily point to her becoming one of America's most acclaimed singer-songwriters in a surprisingly short time.

Regardless of where they ended up on the pop-charts, even the one-hit wonders often seemed superior. Whisper To a Scream (aka Birds Fly) and Just Got Lucky barely cracked the Top 40 while Come On Eileen reached #1. All of them seem more tuneful than pretty much anything topping the current pop charts, many of which sound like the product of people who are aware of what the individual parts of a song should be but not how they fit together.

Like most golden ages, it couldn't last. By the end of the 1980s, MTV already seemed a bit tired. Just a few years later, as striking videos like Losing My Religion were winning awards, the first season of The Real World wasn't far away. The videos obviously still exist and sometimes show up on MTV's subsidiary channels, but it's an exercise in nostalgia, with the thrill of discovery only a memory. Fortunately, we'll always have Rio.