Mtv

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture by Arthur Robinson

MTV (Music Television) is truly one of the most important pop culture phenomena of the late twentieth century. As a medium, it united the two most important popular culture developments of the post-World War II era: rock 'n' roll and television. Within two decades of its birth in 1981, it defined an international youth culture centered around the rebellious spirit of rock music and the ceaseless consumption of goods. To the many millions of youthful viewers scattered across the globe, MTV is the preeminent medium of global youth culture, offering an intoxicating mix of music, postmodern imagery, consumer goods, and original programming. To its owner, the cable television giant Viacom, MTV is a highly profitable cable channel that offers advertisers unparalleled access to a youthful audience. But to its many critics, MTV is a corrupter of youth, a purveyor of mindless consumerism, and a degrader of all that is authentic about music; one critic suggested in the National Review that MTV renders America's youth "deaf to all higher culture, and blind to all hope or beauty."

Though its reach in the 1990s was global, MTV had humble beginnings. The channel was born at midnight on August 1, 1981, a NASA rocket launch countdown preparing viewers for the sudden appearance of a blank screen, a succession of moon shots, and the image of Neil Armstrong planting an MTV flag in the lunar dust. A male baritone voice dramatically proclaimed, "Ladies and Gentlemen, rock and roll," and the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" became the first in a string of music videos to appear in the homes of 800,000 Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC) subscribers. The idea of the video itself was not new: African American performers Count Basie, Louie Armstrong, and Bessie Smith appeared in video clips with their songs in the late 1940s; Dick Clark's American Bandstand dance show offered "live" (lip-synched) musical performances to a national television audience beginning in 1957; the Beatles released their song "Strawberry Fields" on video in 1967; and other 1970s television shows--Soul Train, In Concert, Midnight Special, and Rock Concert--offered live or recorded musical performances. But MTV gambled that the viewing audience in 1981 was ready for a 24-hours-a-day music channel. It was a gamble that soon paid off.

The brain behind MTV was Robert Pittman, a former radio disc jockey who had become an executive at WASEC. Pittman hoped that MTV--along with the premium channels Nickelodeon and the Movie Channel--would give his company an edge in gaining subscribers in the highly competitive cable market. The company's $20 million dollar investment soon proved worthwhile. MTV's audience grew from just over 2 million at the end of four months to 22 million by 1984, and advertising revenues kept pace. Though the channel had pulled in just $7 million in advertising revenues within 18 months, by 1984 it was earning $1 million a week. In many ways, MTV had an ideal cable product: its content cost the channel nothing, for recording companies provided the videos free of charge in order to promote their bands, and advertisers, eager to reach MTV's demographic of consumers between the ages of 12 and 34, offered everything from food to clothes to other youth-oriented products. Through the early 1980s, MTV viewers were fed a steady diet of videos and ads, videos, and ads; in Rocking Around the Clock, E. Ann Kaplan described the format as "ersatz commercials punctuated by 'real' ones."

The first videos to air on MTV appeared rudimentary and awkward beside current efforts. The total video rotation during the channel's initial months was a scant 125 videos. The common denominator for the videos was their slip-shod production, nonexistent special effects, minimal costs, crude narratives, and home-movie type of appearance. A favorite in the first months was Chris DeBurgh's modern revisiting of a Greek myth called "Don't Pay the Ferryman," a moody narrative about a boat trip across the river Styx with the Grim Reaper as companion. But quality improved fairly rapidly, thanks in no small part to the performer who would come to be called the "King of Pop." Michael Jackson's 1982 release Thriller featured three videos--"Thriller," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It"--that revolutionized the art form and galvanized public attention. The video for "Thriller," for example, which began with a long introduction by horror-film guru Vincent Price, was filmed in a graveyard, and cost an estimated $1.1 million. Hyped for weeks before its release, then debuting in select theaters before it came to MTV, this was the first of many videos to generate a "buzz."

MTV's innovative format and seamless blend of content and advertising drew much attention from academics eager to document the emergence of a postmodern frame of mind. David Tetzlaff observed in the Journal of Communication Inquiry that "MTV denies the existence of all but the moment, and that moment exists only on the screen"; in Monopoly Television, Jack Banks wrote that MTV "repudiates linear conceptions of history, rejecting conventional distinctions between past, present, and future, instead placing itself in a timeless present." The result was an experience that decentered viewers, encouraging them to identify more with the products and images on screen than with more historically significant communities of meaning such as families, political parties, or social class. Even after MTV changed to a more traditional format in the mid-1980s, even after so many advertisements and television programs began to mimic MTV's visual style, the perception remained and the critics agreed: MTV led the postmodernist cultural vanguard.