Tag Archives: Early days of MTV

30 Years Ago: I Want My MTV

Posted by Jennifer in Music and tagged with , ,

Regular readers of The World According to Jennifer are probably aware that I spent a lot of time watching MTV when I was a kid. If you are new to the blog, or somehow missed those posts, or forgot that I wrote them, or pretended to read them, but really didn’t… you can check them out here, here and here.

I was in front of my TV on August 1st, 1981 at the exact moment the moon man first appeared with the MTV emblazoned flag. When it came to Music Television, I was, as we like to say now, an early adopter.  So… is it any surprise that I would acknowledege the network’s 30th anniversary? Well, maybe a bit of a surprise since along with posts professing my love, I also wrote about how ticked I was to be kicked to the curb now that I am no longer a member of MTV’s desired demographic.

Admittedly, I wasn’t thinking about being shunned when I tweeted the following:

Which led to this:

and…

And… a Billy Squier reference! Unfortunately, I can’t share that tweet because the person who tweeted it has their Twitter account set to private.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking that I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could come up with one bit of #MTVturnsthirty trivia every day between now and August 1st.

I’ll probably tweet the trivia relatively early in the day– here. That is of course unless I am struggling to come up with something, in which case it could be midnight or… (not at all).

Favorite Things–Music Videos

Posted by Jennifer in Favorite Things, Music and tagged with , , ,

I was 14 years old when MTV signed on the air.  The perfect age to fall under the spell of what was then cutting edge entertainment.  I remember feeling very excited and slightly proud that I didn’t have to call my cable company to say, “I want my MTV” because I had it!  I was what we now refer to as an early adopter, I had access to MTV when MTV was still in very few homes.   This meant I got to see some of the earliest music videos. This also meant that I got to see them over and over, but that is beside the point.  I’d get home from school and rush to the television to watch  Roxanne by the Police,  David Bowie’s Fashion and Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants.  MTV provided me, for the first time, exposure to bands that were not being played by Casey Kasem on his weekly top 40 show and I liked it!  I liked it a lot.  I have no doubt that my love of alternative music can be at least in part traced back to August 1st, 1981–the day MTV signed on the air.

Last week, after years of not playing music videos, MTV removed the words music television from its corporate logo. And while it has probably been two decades since I last tuned in to watch music videos, I still felt a bit sad.  29 years after the Buggles proclaimed that the radio star was dead, Snooki has finished off the music video.

I decided to pay homage to the MTV of old by putting together a list of some of my favorite videos from back in the day.  It was very difficult to narrow the list down to five.

1. Don’t Stand So Close to Me, The Police. Not sure when this first aired on MTV but it was replayed often and I loved it!

2.  Rock the Casbah, The Clash. When I first saw this I had no idea just how badass they were and how much I would wind up  learning about music because of them.

3.  Watusi Rodeo, Guadalcanal Diary. From MTV’s show the Basement Tapes, this was the first and last song I played as a DJ at WUOG in Athens, GA..  I chose this video for sentimental reasons, also for the Nina Blackwood cameo.

4. I Wanna Be Sedated, the Ramones. Even the Ramones, as unattractive as they were, could be stars during the early days of MTV.

5. You Might Think, The Cars.  In the early to mid 1980′s, no one told a story on video as well as the Cars did.  Ric Ocasek transformed into a fly–that’s good stuff!

I could literally go on and on: Squeeze, Split Enz, the Pretenders…   Which videos do you remember from the early days of MTV?