MTV on a Tuesday Wayback

We wake up sore. Finally did the hour on the treadmill and it was the damndest thing. We were just dying and thinking, crap we probably have 20 minutes left. We looked and we had four. Where did the time go? Just awesome. We brought glory to the treadmill.

More plugging along on The Weser yesterday. This thing is really coming together. We will, repeat will, have the rough done by the end of the summer. The Great Nuclear War of 1975 continues to look good. We admit to concerns about the format of this novel. It may just move too damn fast. There's nothing we can do about that. This is it. This is The Great Nuclear War of 1975. The MS will enter editing in September. Two novels are written. Good or bad, they're a go. At some point one must needs trust it Kek, and remind oneself that one is very good at what one does. 

One of this blog's Confederate readers mentioned how MTV got him hooked on the Monkees. For younger readers The Monkees were a TV show rock band from the late 60's inspired by and parroting the Beatles. They have fans. The late Kathy Shaidle did a lot of writing about them. Anyone over 40 now has the theme song in their head.

Beginning about 1986, MTV got a ton of mileage out of airing old shows and old clips. 1966 is roughly where 'the 60s' start, man and by '86 MTV decided enough time had passed. Dear lord it seemed like ancient history. You'd see a lot of Woodstock clips and old television performances. This is how we found out Ozzy used to be in a band. A lot of the late 80's heavy metal imagery was tinged was 60's psychedelic  aesthetics(click warning, people. It's phony and wretched but gets the point across). They played a lot of clips from John Lennon's Live at Madison Square Garden concert. MTV had a Beatles weekend where that's all they played.

The generational wars had not yet begun, and most Generation-Xrs thought the 60's were pretty cool. 'Hey, cool. Peace and love. You know, I hear girls are into that.' The biggest Gen-X music event was the Woodstock 25th anniversary concert of 1994. It's a who's who of Gen-X popular bands (Aerosmith, Metallica, Chili Peppers etc...etc...) , and plenty of acts from the the 60's too, man. Ironic, isn't it?

Monday MTV

Week two of solitude. It's unseasonably cool this morning, 60 F as of this writing. A decent night of sleep. We hit the gym yesterday and did the machines. Treadmill (training session faster on a1incline), rowing, rope pulley, stair master, bike. Felt great. We barbequed a couple of sirloins last night. So far, so good on the gout front.

What Will's Watching, Monsters: Two people trek across alien infested northern Mexico. This film is about alienation and coming together. Monsters is loaded with well executed atmosphere. Director Gareth Edwards did a great job with visual effects, putting aliens, jets, warships in the background. Our characters pass monster carcasses, wrecked aircraft and tanks, giving the film scope. This blog loves scope. 3/4

Thank you, Canada, for defeating US Women's Soccer 1-nill. Thank you. Skanks. Okay, Alex Morgan is totally hot. We'll be having a pint of Molson tonight.

So 40 years ago yesterday MTV was born. There's really no getting across to the younger generation what a big deal that was. My family got cable in 1982. Again, there's really no getting across to the younger generation what a big deal that was. The very day cable was installed, our older sister put on MTV. We still remember the first videos we saw. Stray Cats' Sexy and Seventeen, Spandau Ballet's True.

Rock was pretty dull by the early 80's, and MTV saved it. The videos breathed new life in the genre. MTV also re-launched Metal, all that denim and leather was just perfect for the video format. MTV helped set the tone for the decade. Miami Vice, which did so much for 80's style and mood, began because NBC wanted a show about 'MTV cops'. 

But while people are memeing MTV, and Generation X is getting downright Boomer in reminiscing, everyone's forgetting one thing. At first MTV sucked. Tons of cable companies didn't even carry it. I want my MTV was no joke. The network had a library of a few hundred videos, mostly 70's era promotional videos and concert clips. Anyone like REO Speedwagon, Christopher Cross? And it was a while before record companies grasped the importance of the medium. Ever wonder, youngsters, why original MTV videos are so fuzzy and poppy? Back then, the execs just didn't want to spend a lot of money on them. Tons of videos were shot on cheap tape rather than film. Duran Duran was probably the first band to really spend a ton on their videos. 

MTV meant so much more to us than radio. We perceived pop music through 1800-DIAL-MTV and the MTV top 20 Video Countdown. To this day we still learn that songs we thought were a big deal, really weren't big hits because they got a lot of DIAL MTV air time, but not radio time. 

Anyway, it's MTV week all week here at Stroock's Books. To begin, what's your favorite video?

Springsteen, Madonna, way before Nirvana

On the complete disaster that was the MTV Video Music Awards the indispensable John Nolte says it better than we can:

This is not science. No one needs a slide rule to figure what is going on here. MTV sucks. MTV has sucked for years. Today’s music sucks. Today’s performers suck. It is all a giant ball of suck desperate to cover up that suck with perversion and obnoxious politics.

Go read the rest of that piece younger reader(s). Mr Nolte (PBUH) tells us what MTV used to mean.

We learn that a 'rapper' named Logic took to the stage to talk about mental health. Mental Health at MTV, are the freakin' kidding. This. Is. Mental. Health:

Bang your heeeeeead! Metal health will drive you mad!

MTV has become a prog suck-hole.

You know what? MTV used to be for everyone. You like rap? No problem, MTV had Yo! MTV Raps!. You like dance music? No problem, MTV had Club MTV. You like Metal? Well of course MTV had Headbangers Ball so unbelievably appropriately on at midnight. You like comedy? Well then the MTV Half Hour Comedy Hour is for you. This is where we discovered David Spade and Dennis Leary, in the same episode if you can believe it. You like funny sketches, how about Liquid Television?

MTV was un-serious, but mostly it was fun.

Now, not so much.

Monday (Not Really) Metal

So last night as the girls were getting out of the bath we were flipping channels and  put the TV on VHI Classic , as we often do.

One of the thing about the old 80's music videos, at least the ones from the late 80's is that they haven't aged at all. I mean they look the same as they did the day they came out:

We've discussed the whole Bon Jovi/metal issue before. It  even shows up in A Line Through the Desert, where young Jake argues that Bon Jovi is metal. Written in 2003 I would not write that sentence today. However we categorize Bon Jovi, Dead or Alive is awesome and the video is perfect.

Personally, I always loved it when I discovered a song before it became big. We liked Dead or Alive as soon as I first heard after buying the Slippery When Wet tape. We vividly recall listening to it while setting up NATO: The Next War in Europe on our mother's dinning table.

Forgive us for indulging in a bit of nostalgia, but this year marks the 25th anniversary of our graduating high school and we're really starting to feel it. Don't worry, we're not going to go on about our youth, not really.

We don't miss high school or being young, except for one thing.

1986 to 1994, We call those years 'The Zone'. We remember the absolute comfort of our life style, school, home, TV, reading a book, lights out. Symbolized by the above, the music was a big part of it. So was were the movies, watched almost exclusively on cable. Anyone around back then recalls how relentless the cable networks were about showing the same films over and over again. In this way one saw films like Aliens (anyone else remember how it was one very night the summer of '87?) Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, etc etc.

The Zone disappeared forever in 1995. Everything seemed to changed overnight. Makes sense really. This is the year I moved out, more or less and spent the next 6 years in Northern Virginia before finally moving to NJ in 2001, where...

Jesus...where does it all go?

Monday Metal, Animated Loser Edition

God, how I love Beavis and Butthead. I've loved them since my friend Dave and I watched them in the early 90's on MTV's Liquid Television. Ha! I loved them before they were cool.

Creator Mike Judge brought them along at just the right time. Five years before would have been too early. Five years later and nobody would have cared.

In 1992 when Beavis and Butthead first showed up on Liquid Television, MTV was a decade old. Personally I learned about and experienced music through MTV, not the radio, and my sense of what was hit wasn't through 95.5 WPLJ, But Dial MTV. In 1992 the music video was established and it was important. And it was going down hill.

Just look at this pretentious piece of crap:

Everything that killed music videos is there; pointless symbolism, blurred shots, shaky-cam, uber-seriousness. This wasn't a music video, it was art.

Here's another one:

At first a lot of people thought Beavis and Butthead were 22 minute insult to heavy metal. After all they're decks out in AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts. But this was just background. Metal was the music of the white working class, and Judge was trying to tell us this from where his animated video critics hailed. He gives a few other hints. Once Beavis starts yelling at a plant and it becomes clear he's repeating a tongue lashing he got form his mom, 'How can you do this, after everything I've done for you!?' In another instance Butthead hilariously says, 'I'll have to ask my mom's boyfriend'.

Through Beavis and Butthead Mike judge pilloried what was happening to the genre.  This usually took on two forms. One, this pair of morons was utterly baffled by what they were seeing because it was incomprehensible. Or, the video presented was so sodden with 'edge' and 'art' that Beavis and Butthead 'got it' and would riff on the video in a way that made absolutely no sense, just like the video.

Now I'm not going to show examples, at least not here. That would a a research project, really.

Maybe another post.

You know who else liked music videos? Jake Bloom in A Line through the Desert.