Whatever Happened to MTV?

By Jennifer Hudock on January 28th, 2010

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I’m old enough to remember when MTV blazed into the cable television line-up like an out-of-control, California brush fire. I was eleven years old in 1981, when Video Killed the Radio Star, and as a major music lover I envied all those kids who lived in town and got cable. I made it a point to spend the night in town at friends’ whenever possible because there was nowhere else on TV where you could watch music videos all day, all night.

MTV’s original plan was to play nothing but music videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Music videos! All day, all night! It was a music lovers dream come true. In a way, it’s probably a good thing my parents couldn’t get the cable company to run cable out into our country neighborhood because I’d never have done anything else.

In truth, it is a miracle MTV actually made it. When they first started out, their selection of videos was incredibly limited because the concept of the music video was new to America. Britain, however, had been experimenting with music video “promo-clips” and many of the early videos aired on MTV came out of Great Britain. In fact,  music acts like Duran Duran, who were not receiving radio airplay at the time, more or less owe their international success to the heavy rotation and repetition of the small cache of videos in MTV’s collection.

As the playlist grew and evolved, introducing popular artists like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Prince visually to its expanding viewership, so too did the variety of music MTV began to play. Categorization into special shows became a necessity, with 120 Minutes becoming the first specialized show on the roster. For two hours, MTV focused on underground music, exposing audiences to bands like Weezer, Oasis, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Nirvana.

Heavy metal fans got their own show in 1987, Headbanger’s Ball. Originally hosted by Kevin Seal, then Adam Curry and finally by Riki Rachtman until the show’s demise in 1995.

In 1988, Yo! MTV Raps debuted, becoming the first hip-hop exclusive music series on television. The series is often credited with the spread and popularity of hip-hop music worldwide. It was repackaged in 1995 as just Yo!, but as violence in a number of music videos became more apparent, the series popularity began to decline.

It was during the 1990s that MTV began to to experiment with reality television, debuting The Real World in 1992. Featuring a hand-drawn cast of strangers put together under the same roof so the world could see what every day life was like both in their personal lives and as a group. The success of The Real World was so powerful, it changed MTV forever.

MTV began to rely less on the music that made it popular and unique, and more on pop-culture shows and reality television series’.  To compensate for the loss of music programming, they spawned a second channel in 1996, MTV2, which originally promised to return to 24/7 music videos. Today, however, MTV2 has gone the way of its sister channel, combining pop-culture and reality with a handful of actual music videos.

There is no question the impact MTV had on the music industry and the development of the youth during that critical era when it changed both television and the youth who spent hours in front of the tube waiting for their favorite videos to air. I can’t tell you the last time I actually saw a music video on MTV. My teenager tells me sometimes they play videos in the early morning hours while she’s getting ready for school, but that’s about it. Throughout the day, it’s reruns of reality shows, pop-culture films and series’, the occasional music awards show, but I don’t see any music videos.

So what happened to MTV? Maybe I’m old fashioned, reminiscing about the good old days when music television was actually music television. When flipping to that special channel meant music videos all day, all night–only on MTV. Video may have killed the radio star, but reality killed the video star. Maybe now that YouTube has gained in popularity, there’s no need for MTV to even focus on music videos at all, but I still miss the good old days.