MTV's willingness to play videos by untested artists was what endeared it to music fans at the time. FM radio had long ignored former Runaway Joan Jett, but when her video for "I Love Rock'n'Roll" began to generate attention on MTV, radio followed suit and the song also went to Number One. This song represents perhaps the first "MTV hit" by an untested group.Ĭonsidering the musical landscape of early 1982 (sappy pop, corporate rock and pop-country) it's doubtful that the new wave Go-Go's would have become pop sensations without MTV. As MTV itself caught on, this video gave the year-old song a second life and it became a Number Two hit in early 1982. The Go-Go's showed that an all-female rock band was commercially viable when their live video of the "We Got the Beat" garnered major airtime. The success of "Centerfold" was unprecedented for the group. It was also slightly risqué in its use of the now tried-and-true "schoolgirl" get-up used by the models. The clip was arguably the first video to help propel a song into the Number One position (where it stayed for six weeks). Geils Band's "Centerfold" video went into "heavy rotation" on MTV. The Tom Tom Club also got in on the cartoon action with a cutesy clip for their dance club hit "Genius of Love." David Bowie's "Fashion" employed a masquerade theme and even featured an appearance from Alan Hunter in his pre-veejay days (he can be seen with a prosthetic nose at 2:19 into the video).Ī benchmark of sorts was reached when the veteran J. There was an elaborate cartoon landscape crafted for the clip of "Calling All Girls," a song by a session drummer-turned-singer called Hilly Michaels. Within these confines, directors still managed to innovate and do it without the now tried-and-true shock factor that everyone seems to employ. Some of them were concert clips others were simply silly, probably using the aforementioned Monkees as inspiration. Some videos were already a few years old, but wound up in major rotation because, well, what else was there? There was no competition for airtime amongst artists, so videos were pretty straightforward affairs. "You didn't have a lot of technology you didn't have a lot of money to put into the production.Īt its start, Blackwood says, MTV only had around 300 clips. "Some of those early videos were very corny and cheesy," admits Nina Blackwood in a recent interview for this article, one of MTV's five original veejays. #Mtv intro flash tvGuess the suits in the music industry considered music videos "kid's fare" back then, and didn't want to inject mom'n'pop TV sensibilities into youth culture. Other big hits that year were Three's Company, Falcon Crest and Love Boat. In 1981, the top-rated show was Dallas, a show not known for shying away from sex and violence. But what's more revealing is to compare early MTV to other television shows during that time period. The inclination after viewing these selections would be to say they look like The Donna Reed Show compared to MTV's current sex-saturated videos. The closest the opening day's video lineup got to anything racy was Rod Stewart's "Ain't Love a Bitch" (thanks to its title) and Kate Bush's "The Man with the Child in His Eyes," a sensual clip in which the English songstress wore a tiny white outfit. These were clips of singers simply lip-synching their songs (Pat Benatar's "You Better Run") live concert clips (REO Speedwagon's "Take It on the Run") or primitive concept videos that were usually humorous (Blotto's "I Wanna Be a Lifeguard") or contained some elements of camp (The Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket"). Fox on Family Ties) and Martha Quinn, whose "new wave" get-up looked retro even then. Here, we got to see freshly-scrubbed veejays like Alan Hunter (who looked like he could have replaced Michael J. But it was revived when VH-1 rebroadcast MTV's opening day on the 25th anniversary of the channel's launch. MTV's "age of innocence" is not something the channel likes to publicize, as evidenced by the fact that it totally ignored its 25th anniversary this past August 1. Yet within two years, the channel began to realize outrageousness was what really grabbed the attention of the public, and that changed not only the musical landscape, but the cultural one too. Few people realize it now, but when MTV started, it presented content that was pretty much family-friendly. That's how the Music Television cable channel came across when it first appeared in Aug. Imagine combining the simple presentation of a cable access show with music video clips that looked like they were inspired by The Monkees TV series. Perfect Sound Forever: The early, innocent (?) days of MTVĮarly MTV How the Mild-Mannered Music Channel Became
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