MTV turned 25 this week, and your intrepid correspondent has contributed a few thoughts to a National Review Online symposium on the deeper meaning of it all. Most of the comments in the symposium are fairly light, but there are some interesting facts to be gleaned and ideas to be pondered.
It’s certainly interesting to see this group of right-wingers’ rather amused and unworried reaction to MTV, widely considered to be a powerful force of cultural change. Perhaps American conservatism is not so conservative after all.
For those newly visiting from NRO and looking for additional commentary on the state of popular music, I suggest my post, from earlier this week, on the rise of gloom, doom, and general depressingness in popular music.
In addition, the category entries at the right side of the page offer full lineups of articles in various subject areas, including quite a few on music.
I remember watching MTV when it first came to the Witch City (via a friend’s house; my family didn’t get cable TV until 2001 & then only very basic cable). It was an experience going through the crappy videos to find the gem or two. I discovered a great band called the Undertones through MTV. Significantly though, It wasn’t so much for the video itself, which was pretty pedestrian, but the song itself (“It’s Going to Happen”, by the way, which I still feel is a great song). My feeling is that the rise of MTV put the look of a band over the music. Although the way a band or artist looked was always a part of pop culture history, what MTV did was make it a 24/7 obsession. What it also did, as TV has generally done was to remove the concept of imagination of the listener/viewer from the song. When you think of Duran Duran, for example, you think about the videos first, not the songs.