I Want My MTV Read Free Page A

video”: The Beatles made short films for “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”; the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Doors, and Bob Dylan made similar films, as did TV heartthrob Rick Nelson and country star Buck Owens. Queen’s 1975 clip for “Bohemian Rhapsody” dazzled forward-thinking Britons and helped the song filibuster at number one across the UK. But the term “music video” (which barely existed before MTV) now connotes a specific set of qualities—aggressive directorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colors, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtapositions, provocation, frolic, all combined for maximum impact on a small screen—that were not formalized until MTV provided a delivery system. There is no such thing as “the first music video.”
    What aired on MTV was so strange and unfamiliar that explaining it proved difficult. The channel’s first mention in Time magazine contained language you might use to explain a laptop computer to a caveman: “The main ingredients in MTV’s programming are ‘video records’ or ‘videos’: current recordings illustrated by 3- or 4-minute videotapes.” A year later, Time writer Jay Cocks was still struggling to familiarize the magazine’s audience with MTV, referring to videos as “illustrated songs, little three- or four-minute clips” and “production numbers soaked in blotter acid.”
    Even as MTV struggled financially, and employees worried the network could be shut down any day, its influence rippled across the culture, most quickly in film. In a review of the smash 1983 film Flashdance , Pauline Kael of the New Yorker wrote, “Basically, the movie is a series of rock videos.” She did not intend this as a compliment. The next year, Flashdance producer Jerry Bruckheimer got even more MTV-ish with Beverly Hills Cop , which spawned videos for the soundtrack songs “Axel F,” “Neutron Dance,” and “The Heat Is On.” “It was free promotion,” says Bruckheimer, “another platform to reach a young audience, and it helped enormously.”
    Network television followed; the hit series Miami Vice launched in 1984, according to legend, after NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff wrote the phrase “MTV cops” on a piece of paper. Michael Mann, Vice ’s executive producer, dismisses this as “a nice anecdote without much basis in history, as far as I know.” But Mann imbued the show with a video sensibility: “I watched MTV a lot in those days. And Miami Vice was a radical departure from everything else on the air. The conventional way of using music in Hollywood was to apply the music to picture, more or less. But MTV influenced editing—now, we were cutting picture to music. And the content of videos on MTV was often what you would today call ‘fractals.’ They didn’t have the beginning, middle, and end of a story. MTV forced feature filmmaking to evolve: you didn’t need to bring an audience through so much clunky, conventional exposition of the story. That kind of stuff was obsolete.”
    Also, John Sayles says, “MTV had a huge influence on independent films.” Sayles, who had been directing independent films since 1980, explains that music videos gave novice technicians access to state-of-the-art equipment; previously, someone would “start as a camera loader and fifteen years later might touch a Panavision. Twenty-three-year-old technicians had horror stories about working on videos, and then they’d say, ‘But you should have seen the camera they gave me!’”
    Â 
    THIS BOOK INCORPORATES INTERVIEWS WITH MORE THAN four hundred people who were significant, even if only briefly, in MTV’s Golden Era. It’s been thirty years since the network signed on with a few videos and a flurry of technical mishaps. Memories change over the years and