MTV
Music Television and the video as art form
Description
At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, a new cable channel signed on with a black-and-white montage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, followed by a graphic of an astronaut planting a flag stitched together from the letters M-T-V. A voice-over by Jonathan Steinberg announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” The first video was the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a British synth-pop single from 1979 that had been recorded with no expectation that the form it described would become a billion-dollar industry. The channel had launched on roughly three hundred American cable systems, mostly in the suburbs of New Jersey, with a programming inventory of about a hundred and twenty-five videos. The audience that first night was probably under a million people.
Music Television, abbreviated to MTV before anyone had pronounced the full name, had been built on a thin idea. The cable industry, which had been expanding rapidly through the late 1970s, needed programming. Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, a joint venture of Warner Communications and American Express, had been looking for a low-cost format. Music videos short promotional films that record companies had been producing in growing numbers since the late 1970s could be obtained from the labels for free. A twenty-four-hour channel built around free programming, sold to advertisers as a youth marketing platform, looked like a small bet that might or might not pay off. The bet paid off at a scale that nobody at Warner-Amex had quite imagined.
What MTV did over the course of the 1980s was transform an industry that had previously been organized around sound into one organized around image. Records that had been promoted through radio play and live performance came to be sold, increasingly, through three-minute films made to be watched. The video form, which had existed as a curiosity before 1981, became the central marketing tool of the recording industry within five years and, by the late 1980s, an art form in its own right. The channel did not just sell records. It produced, in its first decade, a body of work that has become the visual vocabulary of an entire generation, and a set of cultural arguments about race, sexuality, image, and the commodification of subculture that the music industry has been working out ever since.
The question we’re asking: what did MTV actually invent in the 1980s, how did the music video become an art form, and what survives of the channel’s cultural argument after forty years?
What we’ll see: the launch, the rise of the video as form, the conflicts the channel produced, and the long afterlife.
Table of contents
01A cable channel built on the labels’ free content
The economic logic of MTV, in its first years, was unusually straightforward. Cable operators paid Warner-Amex a small carriage fee for the channel. Record labels supplied videos at no cost, in the hope that exposure would drive record sales. Advertisers paid MTV to reach the young audience that other channels could not reliably aggregate. The arrangement required almost no programming investment from MTV beyond the salaries of the on-air hosts, called VJs, and the cost of running a satellite transmission. The channel was profitable within eighteen months.
The original five VJs Mark Goodman, Nina Blackwood, Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, and J.J. Jackson were hired from a casting pool of about twenty applicants. The criteria were appearance, energy, and the capacity to read a teleprompter. The early on-air style was loose, with VJs introducing videos from sets that looked like a college dorm room. The first six months were a continuous experiment in finding the form the channel would settle into.
02The form the video became
The early music videos were promotional films in a fairly direct sense performances of the song, lip-synced by the artist, with rudimentary visual effects or minimal narrative. The form changed quickly. Directors trained in advertising and short-form cinema Russell Mulcahy, Steve Barron, Bob Giraldi began producing videos that treated the song as raw material for an independent visual concept. The Buggles’ first video had been a cheap stylistic exercise; by 1983 and 1984, videos like Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” were short films with production budgets in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The form developed conventions quickly. The performance shot, the narrative interlude, the rapid montage cut to a percussion hit, the lyric-syncing close-up, the surreal interjection each became part of the vocabulary that directors and editors learned to combine. The visual style was influenced by advertising, by horror cinema, by surrealist filmmaking, and by the design tradition of postwar American magazines. The hybrid was distinctive. By the mid-1980s, the music video had a recognizable formal identity that was neither film nor television nor advertising, and the directors who specialized in it were among the most innovative visual artists working in the period.
03Race, sexuality, and the channel’s cultural arguments
MTV’s early programming raised the question of who counted as a rock musician, and the channel’s answers in 1981 and 1982 were narrower than they would later become. The initial format, which the executives described as rock-oriented, in practice meant white rock. Black artists, even ones whose audience overlap with the channel’s target demographic was substantial, were largely absent from the early rotation. The Yetnikoff threat that opened the rotation for Michael Jackson was the first major reset. The success of Jackson’s videos demonstrated that the audience the channel was reaching had no objection to Black artists, and the lag had been in the programming logic rather than in the viewers.
The rise of hip-hop on the channel followed a similar pattern with a different speed. MTV began running rap videos in 1988 with the launch of Yo! MTV Raps, a half-hour weekly program that became the channel’s most popular show within months. Yo! MTV Raps did for hip-hop what the channel had done for new-wave rock in 1981: it provided a national platform that the format had not previously had. The artists who broke nationally through the show Public Enemy, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, A Tribe Called Quest — would have reached audiences eventually, but the channel compressed the timeline. By the mid-1990s, hip-hop was the central programming category on the network, and the cultural shift the channel had registered turned out to be one of the most important changes in postwar American popular music.
04The long afterlife
MTV’s relationship to music began to weaken in the late 1990s. The channel had been adding non-music programming since The Real World in 1992. By the late 2000s, the channel had largely stopped playing videos altogether. The function MTV had served the central distribution platform for music videos had migrated to YouTube, which began in 2005 and reached scale by 2008. The combination of broadband internet and a generation that no longer scheduled its viewing made the linear music-video channel obsolete.
The format MTV had built, however, did not go away. The music video continued to be produced, increasingly for YouTube and the streaming platforms, and the production values, the directorial styles, and the cultural logic of the form all carried forward. The videos that broke artists in the 2010s and 2020s Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Kanye West, Childish Gambino, Billie Eilish used the same vocabulary that MTV had developed in the 1980s, applied to platforms the channel had not built. The medium had separated from the original distributor.
05Conclusion
MTV continues to operate as a Paramount-owned cable network, with programming that has little to do with music for most of its programming day. Its cultural function ended sometime in the early 2000s, when the music video moved to the internet and the audience stopped scheduling itself around the channel. The legacy is the form rather than the institution.