I am an
unabashed child of the 80s. I turned 14 in 1980, although I have sort of a
weird concept of pop culture from late 1985 on – I lived at home my freshman
year (mid-1984 to fall 1985), and didn’t have a TV in college. Plus I lived in
England for six months in 1987, which cemented my love of musical artists like
Kate Bush and Marillion.
I grew up in
a small-ish town in upstate NY (real upstate, as in 3 hours north of Albany and
half an hour south of the Canadian border), and we didn’t get MTV for the first
few years of its existence. My best friend, who lived in Virginia and with whom
I exchanged handwritten 40-page letters every two weeks (this was before the
Internet, kids), babbled about this new channel, and I was all “Huh? Whut?” I
watched Friday Night Videos and at
least one Canadian video show, and on Friday nights when I was flipping between
stations, I knew what the hot video was because they were all playing the same
one. Like the night I saw Duran Duran’s “The Reflex” three times…
I remember
discovering MTV one afternoon, probably 1984 or 1985, and sitting there with my
mouth open, sure that it was some kind of promo thing on our cable. I was reluctantly
dragged away for supper (my parents were big on the supper-as-a-family thing)
and mentioned it at the table, and my mother casually said, as if it weren’t a big deal, “Oh yes,
we’ve had that for a week.”
(Mom, don’t
read this paragraph.) I remember when I had a 2-week-long Spring Break party my
first year of college (again, I lived at home that year) while my parents were
away, and we had MTV on All. The. Time. (Okay, except when we tried to watch Krull, but kept getting distracted and
rewinding because we had missed the point.
As if there were a point to Krull. Our
drunken selves were convinced there must be.)
I could go
on about my own memories of that time, but that’s not my point here. (If you
want more stories, just ask. I have a lot. I will endeavor to make them as
amusing as they were at the time.) My point is that MTV had a formative effect
on my life, as it did for many people around my age.
Which is one
of the reasons why this book is one of my recommended reads: I Want My MTV:
The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (Craig Marks and Rob
Tannenbaum).
A good
friend had rec’d it to me, and eventually it burped up in my Amazon shopping
cart “hold for later” or whatever it’s called. I dump stuff in there and when I
want to order a certain item and need to bump my order up to $25 so I can get
free shipping, I peruse that list. And eventually I Want My MTV burped.
I’m sorry I
waited so long.
As an
independent businessperson, it’s smart for me to read about business in the
area of arts. So the early chapters of the book were fascinating in terms of
how the guys took the idea from concept to reality, against all odds.
And then the
book settled in to lots of fun stories about artists and videos and drugs and
sex and music, and the hardest part was not reading every other story out loud
to Ken.
The book is
chopped up into small paragraphs of reminiscences by many people, so it was
easy to dip in and out. I mostly read chunks of it while I was eating
breakfast.
While I was
enjoying it, I got an email from another friend letting me know that for my
birthday, she was giving me VJ: The
Unplugged Adventures of MTV’s First Wave (Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman,
Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, with Gavin Edwards). Since it wouldn’t be on sale
until after my birthday, she was giving me a heads-up.
VJ was the perfect counterpoint to I Want My MTV – an inside look at the same subject in the words of
the first five VJ’s (JJ Jackson passed away a few years ago, but some of his
interviews were transcribed). The first book covered everything and talked to
hundreds of people, whereas this one was more focused on what the work
environment was like. Fascinating stuff again on both levels, business and
entertainment.
If you still
own your parachute shirts or wistfully miss peplum jackets, or if your CD
collection sputters after 1989, then I wholeheartedly recommend these books.
