Why MTV was so much more than just Music Television

I had mentioned in my previous post that my comment ‘MTV made music into a visual medium’ could make for an interesting post by itself. So I decided to dig a little deeper into the impact that a phenomenon called MTV has had on us on multiple levels and fronts. Turns out it gave me enough fodder, and more!

My own tryst with music videos / MTV happened as a matter of chance. Early 90s is when the satellite TV revolution hit Indian shores. Suddenly, having a cable TV connection went from being an offering that dished out four-movies-a-day from mostly pirated VHS tapes with clockwork precision, to a slew of slick TV channels that beamed 24 hours a day. While academically oriented families (which was the entire middle class India) were already averse to watching four movies daily, the prospect of the idiot box being on 24 hours a day was anathema. Young people like me had to plot and plan on when and how to open up the topic of getting a cable TV connection at our homes. It was a fairly long drawn process. For my home, the tipping point for finally successfully getting a cable TV connection happened perchance. I had been at it for some time, but when I chanced upon a promotional teaser for the premiere of U2’s video for One at a friend’s place, I made it my life’s mission to get one just in time for the premiere which was less than a week away. Being an avid movie watcher, premieres were something that I quite fancied but never got a chance to attend one. Little knowing how videos on MTV were screened, and thinking that the video would be scarce after the premiere, I forced my folks to reluctantly agree to get a cable TV connection at home at short notice – just so that I would not miss out on the premiere of One! Due credit to them, they acquiesced. (Sad, deprived lives we led that we got our joys from watching music video premieres!) And finally ‘I want my MTV’ became ‘I got my MTV.’ Such was the lure of this one channel, more than any other, for millions like me. It was our window to an otherwise forbidden world.

Before I go into the deep end of the impact of music videos, a bit of history of how it all began. Midnight of August 1, 1981 is when MTV officially launched. With the prescient video of a band called The Buggles titled, Video Killed The Radio Star. Fellow Gen X’ers will recognise the refrain of the song from Bappi Lahiri’s Auva Auva from Disco Dancer.

Video not just killed the radio star, over the next few decades it systematically all but destroyed radio as a medium of choice.

However, it wasn’t all hunky dory when MTV started. It did struggle a bit in its initial couple of years due to shallow programming because artistes were still coming to terms with the concept of making music videos. However, it did take off like a rocket once they expanded their repertoire to include Rhythm & Blues (R&B) music. Which also essentially meant that black artistes who dominated the R&B genre started getting airtime on MTV – expanding their audience base, and at the same time expanding MTV’s reach and footprint (business opportunities leading to equal opportunities!).

The one artiste who took total advantage of this move was none other than Michael Jackson. Having seen mega success with the Jackson Five, Michael’s move to becoming a solo artiste was aided by MTV’s decision to expand its repertoire. If ever there was a perfectly symbiotic relationship, then Michael Jackson and MTV was it. As the creatively peaking Jackson belted out one monster hit after another – almost each one of those was assisted by one cutting edge video after another. Billie Jean showcased his dancing skills. Beat It took it to another level. And at 13 mins runtime, Thriller was like a mini-story around the song.

As Anonymous (Michael Jackson Thriller and MTV years) points out, “there was something special about Michael Jackson’s music videos that contributed to the success of MTV, beyond just the catchy songs. Michael Jackson made music video a viable art form instead of a promotional stunt, incorporating special effects, storylines, dance routines, and cameo appearances into them. Whereas earlier the videos were regarded in most cases as a way to create “buzz for the singles”, the music videos of Michael Jackson were well-like to a level that a large number of fans couldn’t engage in separating the song from the images they viewed in the videos in Thriller.”

Staying true to the topic there will be video links and hyperlinks galore in this post, for two reasons: 1) moving images have a better impact than written words (especially when they come from an amateur like yours truly); and 2) it’s always good fun to watch some cutting edge videos to relive some of the memories/moments. So brace yourself.

Close on the heels of Michael Jackson was Madonna who exploited the benefits that videos offered her to the hilt. For her, music videos became a means to convey her views, which were often controversial and contrarian to popular beliefs and opinions. While her songs in her initial years were mostly rebellious in nature, Madonna used music videos as a tool to further dare the establishment in many ways.

In a short span of time, music videos became the de facto means to get albums and artistes to climb the charts. No longer was just a pure music album enough to guarantee it multi-platinum status. It had to have equally lavish videos that played on heavy rotation on MTV. If there was one thing that music videos, and as a logical outcome MTV, did was to push the creative envelope of filmmaking to its very limits. It did not always mean that things had to be controversial. They could be innovative too.

In the not so recent past, artistes like Beyoncé took making videos to an altogether different level. Her 2013 self-titled album was accompanied by music videos for all the songs on it. In her words:

“The visuals of the music video help me to show people the visuals in my brain, the story of the music. Connecting visuals to music makes it more of a body of work, it makes people hear the music differently.“

Stupendous success that the album and its videos became, she repeated the act for her 2016 album, Lemonade – albeit in an even more innovative way! Lemonade was released as a 65-minute long music video, consisting of several music videos blending into another, sampling the songs of the album, and thereby telling an ongoing, longer story. Little wonder she calls both these albums of hers as ‘visual albums’. Another prime example of pushing the limits of possibilities is Pharrell Williams who released the world’s first 24-hours lasting music video for his song Happy, portraying happy people in various settings throughout the entire day and night.

Music videos also helped catapult the careers of otherwise middling artistes like Weird Al Yankovic who got an excellent outlet to effectively visually portray the parodies of famous songs that he is known for.

It is weird that in today’s day and age, Weird Al’s videos have been disabled to playback on other websites. The link is there above, and I promise you that if you do click it you will laugh your guts out watching Weird Al rip Madonna’s Like a Virgin & Michael Jackson’s Beat It to shreds.

Weird Al Yankovic reached such a cult status that there is a biopic of his titled ‘Weird’ that released last year starring Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame) in the titular role.

Beyond just pushing the creativity envelope to the max, music videos also became fertile ground for breaking technological and innovation barriers. The video for Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer showcased the potential of computer graphics and claymation in filmmaking. Acknowledging the significant role the video played in popularising the song, Peter Gabriel told Rolling Stone in 1987, “I’m not sure [‘Sledgehammer’] would have been as big a hit … without the video. I think [the clip] had a sense both of humor and of fun, neither of which were particularly associated with me.” 

I have been given to understand that the video also became part of curriculum in colleges that taught commercial and visual arts.

The Norwegian synth-pop band A-ha’s Take On Me merged the real world with a rotoscoped one in yet another milestone video by Steve Barron who was also the director behind Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean. It is quite a telling story about the disproportionate influence of MTV in those heady days that A-ha never had a Top 10 hit in the US after Take On Me since none of their other videos could replicate that magic.

Or take the example of Massive Attack’s Teardrop, which its director Walter Stern lovingly calls “a primitive animatronic half-creature in a puddle of rotten latex.”

Since fantastic storytelling wasn’t enough for Michael Jackson, he decided to delve into innovation and design when he developed anti-gravity shoes (for which he holds the patent) for his music video of Smooth Criminal!

On October 26, 1993, the "King of Pop," Michael Jackson, filed United States Patent #5,255,452: Method and Means for Creating Anti-Gravity Illusion. The patent is for the shoes used to perform Jackson's iconic anti-gravity illusion seen on his 1988 music video "Smooth Criminal." Jackson wanted to solidify his "patented" move. The patent below includes the abstract, drawings, summary, and description of the shoes. The patent allows the "wearer to learn forwardly beyond his center of gravity." The inventors listed on the patent along with Michael Jackson are Michael Bush and Dennis Tomkins, the Hollywood design duo credited with creating Jackson's iconic look. For 25 years, Bush and Tompkins created most of Michael Jackson's personal and professional wardrobes including the military style, black pants, bunched-up socks, and sparking white glove.

Music videos not only made superstars out of the music artistes, they also played a massive role in birthing a whole bunch of avant-garde directors like Tarsem Singh (R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion), Joe Pytka (Michael Jackson’s The Way You Make Me Feel), Michel Gondry (Massive Attack’s Protection), Spike Jonze (Fatboy Slim’s Weapon Of Choice), Gus Van Sant (Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ Under The Bridge), and many others … too many to recount and list here.

This is just such a fun video to watch. Made even funnier with the always-serious and mysteriously intriguing Christopher Walken being so unlike how he has always been on screen.

Even established director’s couldn’t resist the charm and the challenge of directing music videos. It was almost like a rite of passage to earning their ‘coolness’ quotient from a generation that they probably would never have consciously addressed through their feature films. So we had the likes of Martin Scorsese directing the 18 minute video for Michael Jackson’s Bad (I promise you that this post wasn’t meant to be a tribute to Jackson – it just so happens that his impact on music and music videos is too huge and too multifaceted to ignore), Spike Lee’s work with Eminem on Headlights (the irony is not lost when one realises that it’s a Black director directing a white singer in a music genre that’s the domain of Blacks), Brian De Palma with Bruce Springsteen for Dancing In The Dark (yes, it’s Courtney Cox of Friends fame The Boss pulls up from the crowd – it was staged for the video, but became a ritual every time Springsteen played the song live thereafter), Tim Burton with The Killers for Here With Me, and last but not the least David Fincher with Madonna for Vogue, George Michael for Freedom! ‘90 and a whole host of other artistes.

Such was the power of music videos, that they were deployed by film stars to either further their status or get themselves a new image. Here too, Jackson features again with Macaulay Culkin of Home Alone fame in the 11 minute video of Black or White, & Eddie Murphy and supermodel Iman starred in the relatively short 9-minute video for Remember The Time. Then we have Ben Affleck in Jennifer Lopez’s Jenny On The Block, Ben Stiller in P. Diddy’s Bad Boy For Life, Christopher Walken in Fatboy Slim’s Weapon Of Choice, Jeremy Renner in Pink’s Trouble, Scarlett Johannson in Justin Timberlake’s What Goes Around … Comes Around, Bruce Willis in Gorillaz’ Stylo, to name a few.

Music videos also became reference points for the cutting edge in fashion – from street wear to normally unwearable wear. The likes of Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington were already sashaying on ramps all over the fashion capitals of the world, but they got tagged as supermodels after they featured in George Michael’s Freedom! ‘90 video.

At the other end of the spectrum, far away from the world of gloss, glamour, computer graphics and mega productions were the simpler videos that too had you spellbound. The Verve’s Bittersweet Symphony, Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy, Sinead O’Connor’s heart wrenching rendition of Nothing Compares 2 U, Bruce Springsteen’s deadpan look into camera for Brilliant Disguise and U2’s (one of three) videos for One immediately come to mind.

The above three videos are all one continuous shot videos.

We have also seen music videos take on the role of social commentary like Childish Gambino’s epic video for This is America, or Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start The Fire which dwell upon events past that have shaped the world of today.

In addition to the described artistic value, an evolving number of popular mainstream recording artists use music videos as a way to reflect and raise awareness of cultural, societal, and political issues. In other words, they use music videos to communicate a pro-social message: Lady Gaga’s music video for Till It Happens To You raises awareness of sexual assault on college campuses; M.I.A.’s music video for Borders addresses the Syrian refugee crisis; Beyoncé’s music video for Pretty Hurts discusses the pressure on women to have outer beauty in society, and her music video for Formation reinforces the discussion on Black Lives Matter; Hozier’s music video for Cherry Wine attempts to raise awareness of the issue of domestic violence.

It is all of the above, and a lot more, that made “I Want My MTV” much more than a petulant teenagers want. It became a rallying cry that defined not just one’s musical tastes, but their sense of aesthetic, culture, fashion, social issues, societal issues, politics, equal rights, attitude, etc etc.

Closer home, MTV had its moment here as well. Though the Indian market has always been dominated by film music as the primary source of music, MTV was responsible for giving rise to what was then called Indipop and Indirock. Suddenly audiences had their own version of rockstars and popstars who became world famous in India. India too saw its own share of the music video frenzy that catapulted the likes of Lucky Ali, Baba Sehgal, Alisha China, Indus Creed, Sunita Rao, Silk Route, Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo and many others into national consciousness. What was a largely under appreciated underground scene of non-film music became mainstream. Eyebrows were no longer raised when someone said they sang for a living, and not in films! And just like an alternate career choice of becoming a VJ, and as a result a celebrity, became de rigeur in the West, so too it became the case in India. The likes of Cyrus Broacha, Rannvijay, Sophie Chowdhury, Mini Mathur, Malaika Arora, Nikhil Chinnappa all became household names.

But as they say, all good things come to an end.

Business realities of running a channel that was dependent on running promotional music videos forced them to branch out into alternative programming to get advertiser support that funded their core business. And just like how alternative music artistes eventually become mainstream, so too did MTV. Market forces compelled it to let go of virtually all of its music led programming for reality TV led programming. It recast itself from being a music destination to a youth culture platform. But the thing with youth culture is that it can’t be imposed - it is imbibed by the youth organically through subtle hooks. MTV India too metamorphosed into a platform that became less and less about independent music and more about trailers and song teasers from latest movies. Non-music programming became the way to keep the business going. The M from MTV has gone missing.

MTV went from ‘We ONLY play music videos’ to ‘We ALSO play music videos’.

From being the definitive epicentre of youth culture, fashion, rebellion and attitude through music videos, MTV, sadly, has now been on the fringes – its position having been usurped by the Internet, social media, and more recently by short form content on Tik Tok and Instagram. It is the power of music that still creates ‘trends’ among the youth, though. And so, quick to adapt to changing times, musicians are catering to these new byte sized demands. Yet, the video endures. In a much chastened avatar. It’s only a matter of time before we see a 21^st century version of The Buggles song now titled ‘Tik Tok Killed The Video Star (while creating a new breed of video stars)’. And instead of Bappi Lahiri we now have Pritam to do the honours of creating an ‘inspired’ version.

I will leave you with a video that is bound to give you goosebumps. This video for Soul Asylum’s Runaway Train was single-handedly responsible for 21 kids (of the 36 featured in the video) who had run away, to return to their homes.

To quote from a feature in The Guardian, the director of the video, Tony Kaye, says, “Runaway Train was such a great song I could have filmed a brown paper bag for three minutes and it still would have been a hit, but I’ve always tried to do things that have a social relevance. On the way home from my office in Los Angeles, I saw a poster by the side of the road of a milk carton with a missing kid’s face on it. I thought: “That’s it!” I told Dave that I wanted to make a video featuring the faces of runaway or missing children. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sent us the faces of the kids they wanted in the video. Dave was very easy to film singing the song and at the end we had a message: “If you’ve seen these kids call this number.” The record company were very supportive, although after it was first shown on MTV, they called saying: “No kids have come back. Can we replace the faces with shots of the band?” I said: “No, wait.” Then one came back, and another, and another. And it turned into this miraculous thing. The first to come home was Elizabeth Wiles, a teenager who’d run away from home with an older guy. She’d been watching TV with friends, seen herself in the Runaway Train video and called her mom. It wasn’t always plain sailing for the families afterwards – kids don’t run away from happy homes – but maybe things had changed when they went back or they were older and able to cope better. I was in the green room of a TV chat show when they reintroduced a missing kid and their parents, and they were just overwhelmed. Some cases were very sad – they didn’t come back because they were dead – but each time a kid was found, we’d recut the video with a new missing person. We eventually found 21 of the 36 kids we featured. It worked because the song was perfect for it. I’d argue that it was the single most important thing that happened in the history of MTV, because it saved young people’s lives.

Be braver. Be kinder.

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This whole post has been an extended Keep Watching. So I will not burden you by asking you to watch something more. All the links to the videos will take up enough time, and will give you enough well rounded entertainment till my next post.

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