Once upon a time, there was a music channel. It killed the radio star with its power and brought light to a decade that was already dangerously oversaturated (at least in rooms not still wrapped in ’70s wood paneling). We sensed, even then, that it couldn’t last—and that knowledge made it sweeter. This was the age of MTV, brief and blazing, like a god who burns brightest just before disappearing.
It descended like a god with a logo for a face — part flag, part graffiti, part corporate sigil. At first it did exactly one thing, and it did it endlessly: it played music. Not songs in the old sense, but visions. Short myths. Three-minute origin stories where sound finally had a body. You didn’t just hear a band anymore; you saw them, and the seeing mattered.
In those early years, MTV felt less like a channel and more like a portal. The VJs spoke in an oracular half-tone, casual and ironic, as if they were only half-aware of the power they were channeling. Videos repeated until they etched themselves into your brain. You could walk into school the next morning and know without discussion that everyone had seen the same thing you had. A shared dream, broadcast nationwide.
The music itself bent to the medium. Songs became sharper, stranger, more visual. Bands that might once have remained cult curiosities suddenly loomed larger than life. Fashion, attitude, even posture shifted. MTV didn’t just reflect the culture; it accelerated it, like a feedback loop with better hair.
And yet, even at the height of its power, there was always the sense of a bargain being struck. To gain vision, music surrendered something intangible. Radio had allowed songs to remain private, portable, imagined. MTV made them fixed. Canonical. Once you’d seen the video, it was hard to unsee it. The song became inseparable from its images, for better or worse. The era of the ugly rock star was over (for better or worse); charisma was no longer enough. In this new pantheon, you needed a face like a sex god—like Billy Idol—or you simply didn’t ascend.
The myth begins to fray in the ’90s. Programming creeps in. Narratives get longer. Music becomes one offering among many, then slowly just another relic in the temple. The channel doesn’t die so much as it molted, shedding its original purpose in favor of something more durable, more profitable, and far less magical.
Perhaps this was inevitable. Even the old myths warned us: flight is intoxicating, and altitude deceiving. What begins as transcendence often slips into spectacle. MTV had risen so high, so fast, that it mistook height for permanence. The wings didn’t fail all at once—they softened gradually, unnoticed, as music became one offering among many. By the time gravity reasserted itself, the fall felt less like a crash than a quiet forgetting.
Today, MTV still exists, but like many old gods, it survives mostly as a name. The music is gone. The rituals have moved elsewhere. Music is everywhere now, yet nowhere in particular. Abundant, fragmented, algorithmically summoned. We gained convenience and lost communion.
Still, for those of us who were there, the memory remains vivid. A flickering screen. A distorted guitar. A logo crashing onto the surface of the moon. For a brief moment in time, music ruled the airwaves not just with sound, but with image and myth.
When people say I want my MTV, they aren’t really asking for a channel to return. They’re remembering the moment before the fall, when the air still felt thin and full of possibility. Before the wings hardened into something safe and ordinary. Before it flew too close to the sun. Like all good myths, it isn’t the flight we miss, exactly — it’s the brief belief that flight might last forever.
I’m curious, did you grow up with MTV, or did you meet it later, already half-legend? What was the first video that made you stop and stare?
| David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org and he really misses MTV. |
