MTV

Identification Cable television network

Date Launched on August 1, 1981

MTV began as a cable television network entirely devoted to airing the new format of music videos, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The channel was incredibly influential in 1980’s popular culture: Not only did it change the nature of music marketing and the course of musical history, but it also permanently altered the editing styles of narrative television and cinema.

MTV (Music Television) began broadcasting on U.S. cable television networks on August 1, 1981. The channel’s purpose was to provide music videos twenty-four hours a day. Promotion spots during the early years of MTV featured an astronaut on the moon alongside a television, a flag, and the MTV logo. The graphic was accompanied by a simple but heavy guitar riff. The graphic could be taken to mean that the commencement of MTV was as groundbreaking as the placement of humans on the moon. The network’s slogan was “I Want My MTV.” It seemed a way of declaring that there was a demand for the product the network had to offer. The music it promoted was targeted at a young demographic whose collective taste was hard to categorize as being for any one style of music. The first video the network aired was “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a quirky single by the then-unknown band the Buggles that asserted that the rise of music videos would sound the death knell for radio-based musicians.

Early Format and Audience

During MTV’s early years, the network modeled its programming schedule fairly closely on those of music radio stations. It aired several videos in a row, with brief breaks for music news on the half hour and longer breaks at the top of every hour. The videos were even introduced by video deejays, or veejays. In 1987, MTV began airing a week-end summary called The Week in Rock. By broadcasting music news every half hour, all day every day, MTV quickly began to supplant print media such as music magazines as young people’s primary source of information about the U.S. popular music scene.

Music videos were typically three or four minutes long. They sometimes followed a narrative line provided by a song’s lyrics, and sometimes they simply featured a band or artist performing the song, albeit often in unusual, surreal, or constantly changing settings. The videos tended to strive to be visually arresting, featuring bright colors or stark, expressive black-and-white photography. As the medium progressed, some videos were made with the same high production values as Hollywood films, featuring elaborate design, intricate plots, and exotic settings. Videos also quickly developed their own distinctive visual syntax. Most noticeable, they tended to be edited far more aggressively than were mainstream Hollywood movies and television programs. Shots were briefer and cuts were designed to be more obtrusive, again with the goal of seizing and holding the attention of young viewers. As young people did indeed begin watching MTV in significant numbers, moreover, the style of the network’s videos came to define their generation, which began to be discussed in terms of fast editing and short attention spans.

MTV featured a wide array of music, including brand new and formerly underground artists, increasing its appeal to America’s teens. Indeed, as the 1980’s progressed, the youth appeal of MTV seemed almost inevitable, combining as it did a reputation for featuring (and creating) cutting-edge trends of the decade with a distinctive look that differentiated it from any television program that young people’s parents might watch (or approve of). MTV was seen as something belonging to everyone less than thirty years old. It came to serve a function for the youth culture of the 1980’s that radio had served for a similar demographic in the 1950’s. MTV allowed American youths to see what their favorite artists looked like and to follow fashion trends related to those artists. Even the commercials shown on MTV were geared toward a decidedly youthful market. Products advertised were very likely to fall within the categories of cutting-edge clothing, trendy automobiles, fast food, video games, and similar items. Moreover, they came to use the visual styles first developed by music videos, seeking to appeal to young viewers by speaking their visual language.

Bands and Genres

In the early years of MTV, 1981-1984, bands from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Australia were featured in heavy rotation, partly as a result of the fact that those bands were among the most eager to produce music videos and submit them to the network. English bands were heavily represented on MTV’s playlist, followed by Irish, Australian, and Scottish bands, respectively. As a result of the influx of these bands, the musical sensibility that permeated the network was heavily influenced by their versions of New Wave music. Also known as Brit-Pop, or Synth-Pop, these bands typically featured a “pop” sound, complemented by heavy keyboards or synthesizers, and band members themselves were typically fond of fashion. As a result, American audience members concerned to identify with the latest fashions emulated the styles sported by British, Irish, and Australian musicians in their videos.

MTV became instrumental in the rapid spread of certain clothing trends by virtue of its ability to expose millions of fans to those trends simultaneously through its videos. Because music videos were essentially marketing tools, clothing and hair styles became branding devices, and fans chose to adopt particular fashions alongside their choice of particular music styles and artists. Such associations between music and fashion had always existed within popular culture, but the mass broadcast of music videos in conjunction with an ever-growing list of musical subgenres—each with its own accompanying “look”—dramatically increased the conjunction between music, clothing, and identity in American culture and rendered that intersection significantly more important to North American youth.

While New Wave music definitely reigned at MTV, another contemporary music genre carved a place for itself on the network—heavy metal . Typically, the heavy metal videos that were shown in heavy rotation on MTV featured a strand of metal that had grown away from that genre’s roots. Heavy metal had been pioneered by such bands as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, who played a dark, brooding, sometimes occult-based version of hard rock. The heavy metal that MTV seemed to champion, though, was the subgenre known (sometimes derisively) as glam metal . Much like their New Wave counterparts, glam metal artists aimed to be visually appealing. They were known for their long hair, and sometimes wore makeup. Leather jackets and boots and other accessories became standard attire for both band members and their fans. The music itself featured heavy guitar riffs, but in the context of a more pop-influenced sensibility than other types of heavy metal. It remained more likely to contain sexually offensive lyrics than was New Wave music, however.

MTV’s decision to market itself to youth made its broadcast of sexually suggestive videos and other questionable content controversial among some parents. The network sought to allay criticism when possible. Sometimes, one version of a video would be played during the day, and another, racier version would air later at night. The network sometimes opted not to show a video at all, if it was deemed too provocative.

The New Look of Music

While New Wave and glam metal found great success on MTV, there was plenty of room in the network’s incessant rotation for other forms of metal. No-frills bands such as Ozzy Osbourne (formerly of Black Sabbath), Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden began to enter the rotation with a heavy sound, gloomy theatrics, and a more frightening look and sound than that of glam metal bands. As the 1980’s progressed, MTV became the venue to which bands would turn to get noticed. Videos became one of the primary public relations mechanisms of the music industry. Mainstream artists such as Madonna, the Cars, Michael Jackson, and Bon Jovi were all featured in heavy rotation in the days shortly after the inception of MTV.

In 1983, MTV broke its own boundaries with the airing of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” This video of the title track from Jackson’s multi-platinum album, was a fourteen-minute horror movie that featured extensive makeup and costuming to turn dancers and singers into ghouls and zombies. It became one of the network’s most famous videos. Still, MTV was often criticized for rotating few artists of color, aside from Jackson, a situation that the network would attempt to rectify later in the decade.

Charity and MTV

In addition to work by solo artists and specific groups, MTV was instrumental in broadcasting special events produced by larger groups within the music industry. These happenings were charity events, in which a large group of performers would sing and record a song written by the musicians spearheading the effort, and proceeds from the sale of the recording would go to a specific cause, typically feeding starving children in Africa. The most notable of these events were Band Aid (1984), Live Aid (1985), and USA for Africa (1985). Band Aid was the result of combined efforts by British and Irish bands to help starving people in Ethiopia. It was spearheaded by Bob Geldof, of the band the Boomtown Rats. Live Aid was a series of fund-raising concerts, held throughout the United Kingdom and the East Coast of the United States, that featured artists from the United States and the United Kingdom. USA for Africa was composed predominantly of American musical artists, including some legendary Motown artists. These pop music fund-raising events typically featured a single, the recording of which would be filmed and featured as a video to be included in the regular rotation of MTV.

Further Packaging of a New Product

To further appeal to its target audience, MTV began to offer programming that featured activities associated with that audience. Specifically, MTV’s Spring Break began airing in 1986, and starting in 1981, the network began hosting its own annual holiday party, MTV’s New Year’s Eve. As the tastes of its audience developed and changed, and the voices of critics grew increasingly louder, MTV began to offer lengthier shows devoted to a wider array of musical genres. In 1986, 120 Minutes debuted. The show featured two hours of underground, alternative rock and pop and brooding New Wave hybrid music. It was targeted at the college-rock market and other audiences who favored less commercial, mainstream offerings. Also in the middle of the 1980’s, Club MTV aired. The show, targeted at the dance music crowd, did not feature videos. Instead, it was filmed on location at the Palladium in New York City and featured dancers at the club in cutting-edge outfits demonstrating the latest dances. Veejay Downtown Julie Brown would occasionally talk to people in the crowd between spots of recorded music.

In 1987, heavy metal fans were given their own show, Headbanger’s Ball. In addition to airing heavy metal videos, the show featured occasional guest appearances by heavy metal groups, who would interact with veejays in between the videos. Finally, by 1988, Yo! MTV Raps was offered as a way to showcase the talent of rap artists. It was hosted by Dr. Dre and Ed Lover, a rap-influenced comedic duo, and it featured the pair in the MTV studio, again hosting a series of videos and sometimes interviewing relevant guests.

MTV in the Twenty-First Century

Beginning in 1995, the amount of music-related content on MTV declined, and by 2008, the average time spent on music videos on MTV was just three hours a day. The focus of the channel was increasingly on reality television. Notable shows include The Osbournes (2002–5), following the daily life of Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne and his family, and Jersey Shore (2009–12), which focused on the interpersonal drama of eight young people sharing a summer home in the titular location. The latter spawned several spinoffs and maintained high ratings throughout its run, although it also drew controversy over its portrayal of Italian Americans, which many found stereotypical.

In the 2010s, the channel also added more scripted dramas aimed at teens to its lineup, including Skins (2011), a remake of the British drama of the same name, and Teen Wolf (2011–), loosely based on the 1985 film. Despite this, its ratings among younger viewers dropped steadily, as teenagers showed an increasing preference for watching video content online. In 2016, MTV announced that it would be reintroducing its classic series MTV Unplugged, which features popular musical artists performing acoustic versions of their songs. Though MTV Unplugged had initially been rebooted in 2009 and had aired a number of specials featuring artists such as Florence and the Machine and Miley Cyrus, most of these were aired only online.

Impact

The importance of MTV can be found in several of its attributes. First, it both appealed to and helped create the on-demand aspect of the U.S. youth market during the 1980’s. Second, it illustrated the dynamics of popular music throughout the United States, Australia, and Europe, becoming one of the most significant chroniclers of musical trends during the decade. Third, it helped define a generation by offering to millions of young people between the ages of twelve and twenty-four the opportunity to learn more about their favorite artists and to see and hear them more often than at any time previously. The relationship between artists’ public personas, their private lives, and their fan base became both more complex and more intimate than ever before, and it shaped young people’s understanding of and attitudes toward popular culture. The network also decisively altered the landscape of popular culture, both by disseminating fashion trends quickly and widely throughout the country and by popularizing editing styles that were soon incorporated by Hollywood’s film and television studios.

MTV viewers were exposed to bands from outside the market confines dictated by radio, and they were certainly exposed to a much wider variety of bands than were present on any one radio station. As a result, music fans of the 1980’s became more familiar with the diversity of musical options available to them, and musicians who would otherwise have had little hope of significant exposure were able to find markets that could sustain them. Lastly, MTV provided enough cultural legitimacy and financial capital to the new format of the music video to allow it to develop into an art form in its own right. As a result, music itself took on a visual as well as an aural component, and the popular experience of music was altered.

Bibliography

Austen, Jake. TV-a-Go-Go: Rock on TV from American Bandstand to American Idol. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005.

Frith, Simon, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Weingarten, Marc. Station to Station: The Secret History of Rock ’n’ Roll on Television. New York: Pocket Books, 2000.