TV Flashback: Music Videos…on MTV?

Say it isn’t so…..

MTV was launched on August 1, 1981…right before I began my junior year of High School in Salem, Oregon. If my memory serves me right, we had just gotten Cable TV for the first time earlier that same year. When it was launched, MTV was going into very uncharted waters as far as programming was concerned. Most people had little idea of what a music video was since no other channels on TV were showing music videos at that time. Back when they started, MTV was nothing but music videos, 24 hrs a day. In those first months, they pretty much showed the same small cluster of videos…over and over and over…..all day and all night long.

And there I was, with my tiny 12″ black and white TV in my room…..loving every minute of it.

As a teenager, if there was nothing on the other 20 channels or so that Cable TV offered, you could always rely on MTV to fill in the time between shows.

(Yes….a typical cable system back then only had about 20 channels….if you were lucky….)

Trivia Question:

What was the first video ever shown on MTV?

Yes, it was the appropriately titled song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles.

Who?

I doubt the British New Wave Band ever had any other hits on this side of the pond, but they are forever linked to pop culture as the answer to the first video ever played on MTV trivia question.

As a footnote, Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” was the second video played.

Within months, every other girl in my High School would end up dressing and acting like Pat Benatar…while strangely, no one decided to dress up like “The Buggles”.

Strange….

The station employed a cast of Video Disc Jockeys (VJ’s) to introduce the clips, tell trivia related to the videos, and host various contests and promotions. Those original 5 VJ’s were Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson and Martha Quinn.

MTV was a big influence on my teenage musical life. I ended buying lots of albums and cassettes of artists I had never heard of before….but artists who had cool videos on MTV. Now I want to go dig out my ROXY MUSIC and DEVO Albums!….

Now, nearly 30 years later, cassettes and albums are long since dead, as is the concept of MTV showing music videos. The current channel contains very few, if any videos at all, and most of it’s programming has nothing at all to do with music.

Note to MTV….Time for a name change boys!