The early '80's have been on my mind a whole lot lately. My 25 years plus 1 high school reunion is thhis coming weekend. While I cannot (sadly) attend, connecting with folks I grew up with, and then grew apart from in the past quarter century, has been quite nice. At the same time, a tiny fit of nostalgia has dredged up memories I haven't paid attention to much over the years. One of those was the introduction of MTV to our little community my senior year in high school. Even though it debuted in major metro areas a year or so earlier, it didn't make it to our cable provider until sometime in late 1982.
For some inexpicable reason, this song was an early high-rotation song. Unlike the arty-farty Euro-pop and New Wave, it signaled the musical direction the American music industry would take through much of the decade, a kind of watered down hard-rock, differing from the arena rock of the mid- and late-1970's in that the former had the virtue of being kind of new and having the occasional really talented individual or band. I just can't say that about the following . . .
Along with promoting a kind of silly AOR playlist, MTV had to rely on what was at hand, and British bands had been creating interesting promo videos for a while. So while Pat Benatar may have been helped by MTV, so was Duran Duran.
Had I but known when I first saw this video that I was witnessing the emergence of one of the great bands of the rock era . . . "New Years Day" by U2, with a 12"-remix audio . . .
What are your memories, good and bad, of the early 1980's music scene?
“This is the beginning of Bradford County,”
8 months ago
3 comments:
I think I just hurt myself with the memory of "Video Killed the Radio Star." Eh, first video on MTV . . . that and the memories of my brother attempting to duplicate the hairdos.
Snort.
Yes, there were many bad haircuts in videos back then.
Thinking back, I think I started watching music videos on programs like Don Kirshner's Rock Concert and Midnight Special. I remember that DKRC was the first time I had heard a Blue Oyster Cult tune - The Marshall Plan.
I did watch MTV, and remember asking myself "how many times are they going to play that awful .38 Special song?" The repetitive nature of the channel along with the songs they chose to push with heavy rotation did reduce its appeal to me.
I did watch a lot of Night Flight and the Kenny Everett Video Show back then, looking to find something different than the next Night Ranger or Loverboy video. An added bonus to those programs was the comedy shorts that were mixed in with the videos. A favorite of mine from Night Flight were the Firesign Theater shorts.
Ah, yes - Friday Night Videos. They debuted the first ZZ Top video not featuring three models in a souped-up car, remember?
I loved Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and you can find vids from old episodes online and on YouTube. Pretty cool.
Part of the problem with MTV, when it started anyway, was it was envisioned as just another AOR station. It was limited for the first six months or so by the simple reality that it had such a limited supply of videos. I think their first two weeks they rotated all the vids they had every couple days (that's way too much Pat Benatar for anyone!).
MTV did give a couple bands more life than they deserved, like Flock of Seagulls. Other bands, however, got a hearing and an audience in the US that might not otherwise have had one, like Haircut 100 and Heaven 17. British post-punk was creative enough to see the benefits of video as a creative vehicle.
It was Michael Jackson's Thriller that changed the way the game was played. They wouldn't play the video for "Billie Jean", and it took the threat from CBS Records of yanking all the vids for all their artists, and affiliated artists, to get the program people at MTV to change their minds. Up to that point, MTV was bland to the point of parody because it saw itself as an extension of rock radio. They quite literally played to Peoria; it was the demographics and preferences of that small central IL city that governed rotation and group preferences. Combined with racism (everyone knows white kids don't want to see some black guy!) and a narrow vision of "rock", those of us old enough to remember the beginnings of MTV were stuck with Def Lepard and (gag!) Night Ranger while other acts were passed over.
To this day, the former executives of MTV refuse to acknowledge they wouldn't play Michael Jackson (who had produced a couple promo vids from his 1980 release Off The Wall, which also didn't get any air-time), even though the whole business between Jackson's management and record company on the one hand and MTV on the other, is well documented.
For me, who grew up watching Soul Train as well as American Bandstand on Saturday afternoons, it was pretty cool to see some R&B mixed in with the bad Judas Priest videos.
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