I Want My MTV Read Free

within that audience to advertisers, rather than aiming for the broadest possible audience. Broadcasting was Ed Sullivan creating a show that mixed the Beatles with Topo Gigio. Narrowcasting was embodied by MTV’s initial commitment to playing rock videos, which meant videos by white musicians.
    MTV’s narrowcasting mission was challenged by Michael Jackson, whose Thriller videos transformed the network from a curiosity into a fulcrum. A similar event repeated five years later with rap, a style of music MTV feared, hesitantly embraced, and then built its brand around. Once that occurred, MTV became The Singularity, the last media force that represented an encompassing view of pop culture.
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    HISTORY HAS NOT RECORDED THE DATE, LOCATION, OR name of the first musician who was filmed playing or singing, but it’s likely to have happened soon after the movie camera was invented. Musicians are not modest, and the first one who saw a camera in operation probably suggested, “Hey, why don’t you point that thing at me while I play?”
    Each decade had its own variation on music videos. In 1930, Warner Bros. Pictures began making “Spooney Melodies,” short performance films of popular songs, including “Just a Gigolo,” later revived by David Lee Roth. In the 1940s, thousands of black-and-white “soundies” were made with Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, and other suave, camera-ready jazz artists, dancers, and comedians.
    Scopitones edged closer to the modern music video—the Scopitone was a coin-operated video jukebox, created in France and bigger than a refrigerator. In the 1960s, they could be found at diners and truck stops across the U.S. An article in Variety praised “the jet-paced editing, exceptionally vivid color and generally top-drawer production values” of Scopitone videos, many of which are catalogued on YouTube, where the editing seems, to modern eyes, more tugboat-paced. However, Scopitones were shamelessly lewd and provocative, full of cleavage, bikinis, and enough butt-shaking to match any gratuitous display seen in a Sir Mix-a-Lot or Poison video.
    So MTV was the culmination of a fitful relationship that went back twenty-five years. “Since the beginning of time—1956—rock n’ roll and TV have never really hit it off,” said Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, shortly after MTV appeared. “But suddenly it’s like they’ve gotten married and can’t leave each other alone.” Richards picked 1956 because it was the year of Elvis Presley’s debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, which delivered a giant audience of 60 million. American Bandstand , the first regular music show on TV, arrived the next year. After the Beatles topped Elvis by luring 73 million people to their first Ed Sullivan broadcast, the short-lived musical-variety series Shindig and Hullabaloo appeared in the U.S., as well as the long-lived Top of the Pops in the UK. The Monkees was a daffy mid-’60s show about a rock band who acted out their songs in a series of comic, almost slapstick vignettes.
    Music shows of the ’70s centered on live performances: The Old Grey Whistle Test in England, and ABC’s excellent In Concert , quickly followed by Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (hosted by Kirshner, who, years later, claimed credit for MTV and music videos), NBC’s The Midnight Special (often hosted by the bland soft-pop star Helen Reddy), and PBS’s more homespun Austin City Limits in 1976. There were even music-video programs prior to MTV: Australia had Countdown and Sounds , neighboring New Zealand had Radio with Pictures, the unhosted show Video Concert Hall began on the USA Network in 1978, and WNBC-TV in New York had Album Tracks , hosted by future MTV execs Bob Pittman and Lee Masters.
    There were plenty of precedents for what began on August 1, 1981. And many pieces of film have been cited as “the first music