May 29 – The Turntable Talk, Round 3 – Not Everyone Wanted Their MTV

Today we begin our third instalment of “Turntable Talk”, where we’re happy to have some fellow music fans and writers weigh in on music subjects. Hopefully you were able to take a look at our first couple of topics, Why we’re still talking about the Beatles, and then the Pros and Cons of Live Albums. Today, we start asking “Did Video Kill the Radio Star?” The Beatles began making music videos as early as about 1966, and Britain had a few TV shows featuring videos weekly in the ’70s but in the ’80s, the form took flight with the appearance of MTV and all-day videos in the U.S. Love ’em or hate ’em, they undeniably altered the music world as we knew it. So what are the thoughts on the music video? Today we have Max from Power Pop Blog giving his opinions:

For Dave’s question… how much did MTV change the music of the ’80s?

Video Killed the Radio Star… That was the first song played on MTV and it was pretty much dead accurate.

MTV changed music’s landscape. I was there when it launched, and I would stay up till 4 in the morning at a relative’s house because we didn’t have cable. Personally, I think it was a huge mixed blessing. When I listen to a song, I like to draw my own conclusions about what it’s about. You now had music videos that you couldn’t help but think of when you heard the songs on radio.

Some artists didn’t want to do videos for that reason. Bruce Springsteen was one of them. His first video was off the Nebraska album, and it didn’t even feature Bruce! When he did do videos, it usually was a live clip of him. He did make one for “Glory Days” that followed along with the song. The Replacements refused to do a regular music video and their career went down, but other artists gave in because they had to. Many were fun and they enjoyed it, so it worked for some artists.

I think it helped some artists greatly like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince. Without MTV I don’t know if they would have been as big as they were. I have no doubt they would have been big but not as mega-huge. MTV helped push them over that line as well as others.

There are other artists like Duran Duran, Twisted Sister, Janet Jackson, Cyndi Lauper, Whitesnake, and others that I think owed a lot of their success to MTV.

Hair metal flourished during this time. They made videos that guys liked to watch…even if I didn’t like a particular song, I was going to watch the new Whitesnake video.

Who didn’t pass the looks test? We probably will never know. Would Janis Joplin have ever made it in the MTV generation? I seriously doubt it.

I’ve talked about image but…to be fair…image has always been important in pre-MTV rock… but now music videos put a group’s appearance under the microscope like never before. In some cases, the music alone was no longer enough. While it used to be that you needed the talent to back up the looks, in the MTV era it was often the other way around.

Chrissie Hynde had this to say about MTV: I grew up in the late sixties… You know, AM radio then went into FM radio. AM radio was coast to coast and it was very regional. Every city had its own radio station and its own playlist! When MTV came along it all got filtered into one thing. It had to go first through a video – often a soft-porn video, because some of the artists knew that sold – and that became sorta dance music, I guess.

It wasn’t rock n’ roll any more. If you look at videos that were made back then, they look silly now. The pomposity of it. You can smell the money that went into it.”

There is some truth in what she is saying. They did end up with homogenization of the music…especially guitar-driven rock and roll as it went along. Heavy metal, new wave, and dance-pop did well on MTV. Regular rock and roll? Not as much.

I think of the Dead Kennedys song “Get MTV Off The Air”

“How far will you go, how low will you stoop
To tranquilize our minds with your sugar-coated swill
You’ve turned rock and roll rebellion into Pat Boone sedation
Making sure nothing’s left to the imagination”

Lead singer Jello Biafra: “The way they were laying it down then was, ‘This is the way music is going to go. From now on, there is no point in even writing a song unless you know what it’s going to look like on TV.’”

As I said at the start. I have mixed feelings about MTV. Did I enjoy it? Oh yes, I did enjoy it. I was exposed to some music that I wouldn’t have otherwise. “Mexican Radio”, “Electric Avenue” , and so many more.  I’m sure of one thing. If MTV would not have existed, music would have been completely different in the ’80s. It was and is a cultural landmark that will always be there.

MTV took a lot of power away from radio stations. Artists now went to MTV to play their video. One stop shopping to get their music to a mass audience. This was when radio stations were mostly local and knew the city, they were in. From Toronto, Thunder Bay, Nashville, Austin, and Grand Rapids… they knew their audience.

This is where radio learned from MTV. Today radio is big monopolies with pre-made playlists for everyone. Always happy to play the same songs over and over. We have lost a lot of the local flavor in radio and MTV wasn’t the only reason but it played it’s part.

I think they had good intentions going in but like a lot of organizations with good intentions…they may have attained too much power and that leads to…in this case The Real World and MTVWNM….(Music TeleVision with NO Music) .

Video Killed The Radio Star…indeed.