The Debut: I Want My MTV
RSSDodie Ownes
In the book's acknowledgements, Craig says he spent hours searching YouTube for new wave videos. At first, that sounded painless to me, until I started watching MTV's old music videos and realized that the research process probably wasn't all fun and games. Marks: There are certainly drearier research projects than refamiliarizing yourself with the first decade of music videos and MTV. If the worst complaint an author can make is, "Oh great, now I have to watch 40 music videos on YouTube in the next three hours," he or she has a pretty good gig. This book would have been incalculably harder to write before the advent of YouTube; I'd say 90 percent of the hundreds (if not thousands) of videos I watched for this book are available via YouTube, and the rest are online somewhere. In fact, the only video I couldn't find online during all my research was a Christopher Cross video for a song called "Charm the Snake," directed by none other than David Fincher. I'm certain he had his people scour the Internet and remove every last trace of it. I should also cite a website called Music Video DataBase, a one-man IMDb (Internet Movie Database) for music videos. At times, when I was reading your book, I felt like I was at a fabulous cocktail party where all the rockers let their hair down-Pat Benatar talking about what a bad dancer she is, MTV VJ Julie Brown noting that Billy Idol makes a good cup of tea in the morning, and what Sebastian Bach was doing right before he went on scene for his "18 and Life" video. It must have great fun for you. But did a few doors get slammed in your face when you were collecting these stories?
Marks: Most everyone we interviewed was very generous with their time and their stories. The passage of time has a way of loosening tongues. Also, this was the '80s we were talking about, and everyone did embarrassing things in the '80s. And artists, record executives, directors, producers, TV execs, and the like are natural-born storytellers; they've led colorful lives, and they recognized that the era the book is set in was the last gasp of a kind of rock n' roll hedonism. They were delighted to be part of it then, and to celebrate it with us now. I was pleased and surprised to read about Kevin Godley and Lol Creme and their early involvement with MTV. When I was in high school, I loved their band 10CC, but all of my friends thought they were weird. They come across as a couple of affable, smart stoners who embraced the new frontier of music videos. As MTV became more successful, it seems as though it was harder to be a nice person and survive in an increasingly competitive environment. Marks: What Godley and Creme initially loved about making music videos was the lack of boundaries-no one knew what a video was supposed to look like, so no one could tell you what to do or not to do. In these circumstances, they were the greatest directors of the early- to mid-'80s, including Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" and Herbie Hancock's "Rockit."
But the music video industry was unsupervised mostly because no one in the music business thought it would succeed—once these videos became big business, directors found they were being monitored by the record companies who hired them and often dictated what videos should look like. Any director who'd previously had unlimited freedom disliked being told what to do; several of them left the business, and after the mid-'80s, videos became much more codified, uniform, and predictable. Their sense of adventure and experimentation was dampened by commercial pressure (to make a "hit" video) more than any other factor. John Cannelli and Sam Kaiser, both vice presidents at MTV in the late '80s, were blown away the first time they heard Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle." (I had to laugh at the reference Cannelli makes to hearing it on a Walkman!) Was the music video for "Welcome to the Jungle" a turning point for the creation of higher budget videos and having more heavy metal on MTV? Tannenbaum: "Welcome to the Jungle" was not an expensive video, especially compared to later Guns N' Roses videos, which cost $1 million or more. Watch "Jungle" and "Estranged" back to back-the first has a clear concept and is effective, the second is sprawling and incomprehensible, like a European avant-garde film with a metal soundtrack. (Even the director admits he didn't know what the video meant.) Expensive videos were necessarily better than cheap videos, but in the music business, as throughout the entertainment business (and throughout the United States), there's a belief that something Big is inherently better than something Small. In terms of costs, the most significant video was Michael Jackson's "Thriller," in late 1983; at a time when most videos cost $30,000, Jackson spent $1 million. In order to compete with his spectacles, other artists suddenly had to spend a lot more. Guns N' Roses made metal more present than ever on MTV, but they were playing metal videos ever since the beginning, with Def Leppard, Motley Crue, and Twisted Sister. Hardly anyone at MTV loved metal, and at various times they tried to reduce or eliminate that music from the network, but every time they did, ratings went down. Metal fans are loyal and avid, and they gave MTV a financial incentive to show hard-rock videos, even ones where women were locked in cages (Def Leppard's "Photograph") or sprayed with a fire hose (Warrant's "Cherry Pie"). There were many accusations that the network promoted sexism, racism, and violence. The Tom Petty music video "Don't Come Around Here No More" prompted Tipper Gore to create the Parents Music Resource Center. Jeff Stein, who directed the video, crows about having not one but two videos on a "most offensive" list. When I look at the Petty video now, it all seems rather tame. How willing were people to talk about censorship at the network? No one who worked at MTV believed they were censoring musicians—they wanted the network to be outrageous, but they were also worried that if it got too provocative, in terms of nudity or violence, they'd be criticized or sued by the FCC, politicians, preachers, or cable operators. Remember, MTV didn't make the videos, bands did, and musicians didn't always share MTV's sense of caution. When a band spent their own money to make a video, they didn't like to feel like MTV had final approval over the video's contents. There was a lot of friction, and outcomes often depended on who had more power. If you were a young act, you did what MTV told you to do. If you were Madonna, you told MTV what to do, because the network wanted exclusive interviews with you. Even with Madonna, there were exceptions—her video for "Justify My Love" was just too racy for MTV, which declined to show it. Do you believe, as some in the book do, that The Real World was the beginning of the end for MTV? Tannenbaum: No, I don't, and the facts just don't bear that out in any way. MTV's ratings are at their apex, thanks largely to Jersey Shore. You can grumble all you want about the vulgarity and vapidity of Snooki, but really, is she any more vulgar and vapid than Nikki Sixx? MTV is for teenagers; if you were 17 in 1984, MTV shouldn't be for you in 2011. I can't blame MTV for the fact that people would rather watch kids throw up in a hot tub than watch an a-ha video. I do, however, have sympathy for those who mourn the loss of the time when MTV and music videos were inextricably linked, and when everyone, it seemed, sat in dumb rapture and inhaled the new Madonna or Michel Jackson or Sinead O'Connor video at the same time, collectively. That sense of community is gone, now that the Internet can microserve you exactly what you want, when you want it. David Mallet, a director of some of the earliest and most successful music videos, told you about a note he received from Keith Richards that says, in part, "TV and rock n' roll have always had a weird marriage." Where does music fit in with the smartphone viewing universe today? Tannenbaum: In the 1980s, videos created a sense of community. Kids gathered in rec rooms or basements to watch MTV and waited excitedly for their favorite clips, sharing the anticipation with one another. Sure, you can watch a video on your smartphone, but you're all by yourself, which diminishes the joy, and how much spectacle can you really see on a 2" by 3" screen? Before MTV, music videos were of little consequence. Once the channel created a platform to show videos, the industry developed ambition and creativity, leading to a golden age of video. But then, starting in 1992, MTV began its transformation into a reality-TV network, which eliminated the platform. Now, videos have returned to their pre-MTV stature—rarely seen, made on the cheap. If you're the kind of young and adventurous person who in the 1980s would have made music videos, you're probably working for an Internet startup or a gaming company. MARKS, Craig and Rob Tannenbaum. I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. Dutton, 2011. Tr $29.95. ISBN 978-0-525-95230-5. Check out SLJ's Adult Books for Teens blog for a full review of I Want My MTV. This article originally appeared in School Library Journal's enewsletter SLJTeen. Subscribe here.
One of the perks of being part of SLJ's family is that I have access to books and authors. When I first heard about I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, I called the publisher and requested an advance copy. Ten minutes into it, I was emailing the publicist to see if I could interview the authors. Though Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum have been writing and editing for years for magazines like Spin, Blender, and Rolling Stone, this is their first book, and it is getting rave reviews. Those of us that actually lived through the MTV era will revel in the memories this oral history brings back, and teens that were into the video game Rock Band or dig classic rock will discover often hilarious and shocking tidbits about their favorite bands.
