Lateral: I want(ed) my MTV, a story in six parts (1)
The 1980s in the United States truly began on August 1, 1981, when MTV went on the air for a few suburban and rural areas of the country. Reagan casts aside the cultural density of the 1970s and lays the foundation for a new period marked by consumerism, an emphasis on the individual, and the simplification of messages to an almost elementary level. Only a few dozen people believe that a TV that broadcasts video 24 hours a day can be successful. All of them celebrate a few hours after the launch in a bar in New York.
MTV changes the rules of music, imposing a corporate approach that replaces almost every form of counterculture with style and image and becomes the sun around which popular culture revolves. It’s more about looking good on the screen than sounding good. The aesthetics of the network — accelerated editing, celebration of youth, impermanence, beauty — influence not only TV, radio, advertising and cinema, but also art, fashion, adolescent sexuality and even politics. To achieve this goal, MTV risks bankruptcy several times and is saved with a dollar given to Mick Jagger.
Many would have preferred it to fail: those who have always accused MTV of driving the commercialization and simplification of rock and pop music, standardizing aesthetic formulas and reducing spontaneity.
Now that the channels dedicated to music on MTV in Europe have been closed, it is the right time to talk about the glory years of video clips, in the world and in Italy. Before Napster, YouTube, social media and streaming platforms overwhelmed the way we consumed music, kids did one thing separately but at the same time: they watched MTV (and DeeJay Television and Videomusic). This is the six-part story of what happened, with a playlist to accompany the story with music. I want(ed) my MTV.
Part One
Los Angeles, Sheraton Hotel, November 15, 1979
In 1979, video in music was still an uncertain format that the recording industry looked at with curiosity mixed with distrust. It’s not cinema, it’s not television, it’s not even just promotion. Billboard organizes the first International Video Music Conference at the Sheraton-Universal Hotel in Los Angeles. In the room there are managers of the majors, producers, technicians, distributors. We talk about videocassettes, videodiscs, synchronization between audio and images, rights, costs. The theme is simple: understand if the video can become a product and not just a promotional accessory. The idea going around is that music is entering a phase in which image matters as much as sound, but no one is yet able to say how and how much. Some artists are already moving in that direction. Blondie, Devo and other groups use video as part of their identity, not just as an illustration of a song. The conference records this movement and tries to give it an industrial framework.
During a panel titled “Video Music—Tomorrow Is Here Today,” John Lack declares his intent to start a twenty-four-hour video music channel. Lack is executive vice president and chief operating officer of Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC), a joint venture that is exploring new frontiers in cable television — including nascent theme channels and experimental music-related video content projects. He is not an artist or a creative person; it does not have an aesthetic manifesto, but a commercial vision: it sees the music video as the raw material for a new format, a “video radio” that broadcasts music 24 hours a day, continuously, just like a radio but with images. He has a very industrial and practical position: his discussion is not on the poetry of images, but on money, rights, availability of content. Who has the videos? In what format? Who will grant them? And under what conditions?
When MTV aired for the first time on August 1, 1981, it was John Lack himself who pronounced the famous opening words: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”, immediately before the first video clip broadcast.
But why think about an all-music TV channel right now? There hasn’t been a technological innovation that makes this more possible than it had already been years before; there isn’t even a specific demand from consumers. However, there are the cultural conditions for such a product to work. At the end of the Seventies, America seems to have left behind decades of civil commitment, social tensions and countercultural experimentations: the battles for civil rights, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, the energy crises and the discussions on public morality have sculpted a generation tried, disillusioned and in search of clarity. In this climate, the cultural industry is starting to move towards an extreme simplification of messages, reducing complexity and ambiguity into easily digestible formulas. Cinema, after the creative fervor of New Hollywood, shows signs of tiredness: the most daring and experimental directors give way to more direct blockbusters, with simple plots and archetypal characters, capable of speaking to an audience that desires immediate entertainment rather than deep reflection.
And just as the music industry is discussing the technological and communicative transformation of video as a commercial medium, American politics announces a figure who will make the simplification of the message and communicative clarity the hallmark of his leadership. The Billboard conference begins on November 15, 1979: the last piece necessary for the transformation that is about to affect America and the world arrived two days earlier. Ronald Reagan formally announces his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, in a national speech in which he explains his motivations and electoral program as the Republican candidate for the 1980 Election Year. Governor of California and Republican candidate, he builds his campaign on clarity, the strength of the message and simple rhetoric, alternating jokes on the need for security and prosperity with slogans such as “Let’s make America great again” – the first outline of the historic leitmotif that will span decades – and calls for individual trust and personal responsibility. His figure becomes a cultural as well as political point of reference: the public, tired of complex debates and social contradictions, reacts positively to clear, direct and reassuring language.
Music, television, cinema and politics — for the first time in twenty years — begin to move in parallel towards a simplified, iconic and easily memorable communication model, in which images, slogans and clips replace the long reflection of previous years. The simplification of the media and that of political messages become two faces of the same cultural transformation: America is ready to see, listen and react without complex intermediaries.
New York, Sheraton Hotel, August 1, 1981
On the night of August 1, 1981, a few minutes after midnight (00:01 Eastern Time), MTV: Music Television, the new cable channel dedicated exclusively to music videos, officially aired. The monoscope gives way to an opening spot constructed like a poster: images of the Space Shuttle Columbia during launch, stills of the Moon landing and the flag with the MTV logo. Immediately afterwards, “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles starts, a symbolic choice to launch an idea of music that is no longer just listened to, but watched.
It’s still an experimental, low-budget operation. There’s no large traditional network-style control room: in recent months, the team has been working with what it has — temporary studios in New York and cable facilities in New Jersey — while the VJs (video jockeys) prepare to deal with rudimentary technology and a still very limited database of video clips. Record companies have produced few materials, often designed only for single promotions, and in the first days of broadcast the videos are in continuous rotation; sometimes the screen remains black during tape changes as operators physically replace cassettes in VCRs.
The channel is for a few: in the first hour of programming only a few thousand homes connected to New Jersey cable systems can see the stream. In New York, where MTV has its base of operations, the actual distribution of the signal is still a labor limae of the fledgling television cable industry. Despite technical problems, budget limits and scarcity of material, in the control room and in the bars where the staff follows the departure – around a hundred people including team and friends from the network – you can sense that something new is happening: perhaps not epochal, but certainly revolutionary in the way music enters homes.
Over the next few hours, the programming repeats videos by Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, The Who, Todd Rundgren and other names of the moment, while the technicians fix signals, flow drops and system limits. Nobody in 1981 really feels the need for 24-hour music videos: the roster is fragile, with second-line names, often British or Australian, almost never American. Yet, MTV decides to make that void its own playground, obtaining videos without spending a dollar and convincing record companies to produce them almost as a favor, creating a space for kids, a segment that TV seems to have forgotten. In the first months the challenge is concrete, but the ambition is clear: broadcast music videos 24 hours a day, give that image+sound language a structured space and propose a new way of looking at music.
Reagan took office a few months earlier, on January 20, 1981, inaugurating a presidency that marked a clear paradigm shift compared to the 1970s: a more assertive foreign policy, a return to patriotic and conservative values, and a cultural and economic message marked by individualism and the myth of the “American dream”. MTV embodies this change: rapid consumption, visual icons, immediate heroes, spectacularization of music. The message density, political commitment and formal sophistication of the 1970s already seem out of sync with this new visual and cultural aesthetic.
A year earlier, the foundations for the consumption of easy-to-use music had been created in England. The decade of classic rock has come to an end – “The Wall”, “London Calling” sound like the latest epigones – and at the same time the 45 has regained centrality: after years in which it was more an object to hide than to show, it is once again important, desirable and immediately recognisable. Paul Morley in the NME, architect of New Pop, observes that with the passing of Joy Division, pop must find a new direction: towards an “overground brightness”, a luminosity that brings life back to the radio and makes the single count again. New Pop marries punk’s sense of urgency and self-determination with values rejected by post-punk: glamour, theatricality, high rankings, over-the-top image. The British number ones of 1980 — “McCartney II,” “Peter Gabriel 3,” Kate Bush’s “Never Forever,” David Bowie’s “Scary Monsters” — sound like the final stop of an era, the endpoint of a decade before the new pop culture takes over.
It is precisely this immediate consumability of the single that prepares the ground for the music video: if the song must captivate in a few minutes, the video becomes an essential tool to amplify its impact, make the music visually recognizable and transform the single into a multisensory event. MTV thus finds an audience ready to accept music as an integrated product of image, theater and rhythm.
While musical TV starts in New York, Warren Beatty completes the editing of “Reds”, a film that tells the story of the life of John Reed and the Russian Revolution with over three hours of interviews, documents and reconstructions. It is not a conventional biopic, but a mosaic of complexity and political passion: the last great song of the density of the 70s before linearity, national myth and spectacularisation of history became the hallmark of the 80s. MTV will help to design them, while all music will change its face.
Part one – continues tomorrow March 15th
