"Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n' roll."
As revolutionary moments go, it was a pretty inauspicious start. Yet with that simple opening, the all-music channel MTV flickered to life at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, with the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star. The first hour also featured videos by Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, and The Who.
With a cast of VJs ~ Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, JJ Jackson, Nina Blackwood and Mark Goodman ~ and around 150 videos to work with, MTV was born.
This was the summer of 1981, the year my friends and I graduated high school. Before personal computers, pagers, cell phones, Play Stations, or anything remotely high tech, when life was still sweetly simple. That summer of 1981, we were still blessedly unaware of some little known disease called AIDS.
But we had MTV. And we watched every minute we could. It didn't matter that the videos were grainy or just this side of lame. We couldn't get enough of those early clips that had no pretensions -- and no budget:
John Cougar teasing us he Ain't Even Done With the Night, Rod Stewart bouncing through Do Ya Think I'm Sexy, Golden Earring's Twilight Zone, The Stray Cats' Rock This Town, The Vapors' I'm Turning Japanese, Dexy's Midnight Runners Come On Eileen, WHAM! Wake Me Up Before You Go Go, and Toni Basil's Mickey were the order of the day. The playlist continued with hits from Devo, Billy Idol, Men at Work, the Fixx, the Thompson Twins, Billy Squier, U2, Prince, Crowded House, Adam Ant, Talking Heads, Duran Duran, Journey, Pat Benatar, The Police, the Go-Go's, The Cars, Human League, Flock of Seagulls, a-ha, Cyndi Lauper, Culture Club, Def Leppard, J Geils Band, even Billy Joel -- these were the early '80s music-video staples.
We had American Bandstand, Soul Train, and Solid Gold before MTV came along. And while, music videos were around before MTV, especially in Europe, this new network brought them to a much wider audience, an audience on the verge of the "me" decade and ready to embrace the new idea of an all-video, all the time television channel delivering everything we wanted from the music world 24 hours a day.
Remembering all the artists that paved the way for today's MTV generation takes me way past feeling nostalgic, it makes me regret that today's children don't have it as simple. This feeling goes far beyond the fact that MTV's current programming only includes time to show actual videos a mere two to four hours a day and that our children have become jaded and almost impossible to shock.
