When MTV ruled the world

Paramount/Skydance announced most MTV channels will end, while the flagship will continue as a ghost of its past.

I am the MTV generation. I wasn’t there for the very beginning, because in our Seabrook, New Hampshire apartment, we didn’t have cable in August, 1981. But some of my friends did, and we feasted on hours of video the way kids today doomscroll TikTok. When I graduated high school, I spent a semester attending college in Columbus, Ohio, where they had this thing called Qube Interactive Television; it was cable with a talkback voting capability. It also had MTV, and in our student apartment, that’s where the television was permanently tuned (except for football).

Image: Grok

I remember in late 1982, practically every morning they’d play many of the same videos. SAGA’s “On The Loose” is burned into my brain from overexposure. Some of the greatest short-form art I’ve ever seen happened on MTV: A-Ha’s “Take On Me”, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing”. And of course, when Michael Jackson dropped “Thriller” in December, 1983, MTV caught fire.

Then something happened. We grew up, and MTV had less use for us. One thing most people don’t realize—I should say didn’t realize, because these days young people intrinsically understand content creation—is that music is a business, and media is its expression. The great Quincy Jones, who passed in 2024, had a revelation in his 20s. “We had the best jazz band on the planet, and yet we were literally starving. That’s when I discovered that there was music, and there was the music business. If I were to survive, I would have to learn the difference between the two.”

MTV was the best expression of the music business, as pure as summer rain. But it was also its own artistic forum, because videos put music in front of eyeballs, and eyeballs sold albums. So while we 80s kids could watch Headbanger’s Ball or Duran Duran “Rio” all day long, the suits at Warner-Amex needed fresh eyeballs to sell advertising. So they went into rap and hip-hop, but they also refreshed their content, adding MTV News and Rock the Vote for the adulting folks.

The revival came in 1989 when MTV unveiled Unplugged. It was a cultural tsunami: Aerosmith, Elton John, Sinéad O’Connor, Poison, Joe Satriani (who I recently saw touring with Sammy Hagar, playing Van Halen hits), and Stevie Ray Vaughn graced the first season. Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Don Henley, Sting all joined in the early 90s. Then Clapton rearranged “Layla” and played it unplugged. Heads exploded, including mine.

I’ve recently rediscovered grunge, but Pearl Jam hit Unplugged in 1992—the album was finally released in 2009. Follow me down the rabbit hole. In the mid 90s, I was a work machine. I did find time to listen to some music, like Fastball for instance, but generally stuck with my tried-and-true, U2, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones. My 16-year-old sparked me and I just spent a month listening to everything Chris Cornell ever sung. I was blown away by the posthumous “Nobody Sings Like You Anymore” album, and Cornell’s cut of ELO’s “Showdown”. I had Soundgarden and Audioslave on shuffle and repeat on my daily commute. Axl Rose was right, Cornell buries everyone vocally. Such a loss—even Bono mourned when Cornell succumbed to depression and suicide.

Soundgarden joined MTV Live and Loud in 1996. Grunge was an MTV thing like fish are a water thing. They grew up, like I did, in the MTV generation. But MTV began to move on, playing less music video and more content like Beavis and Butthead. I mean, who my age doesn’t get a little nostalgic for Cornholio? I never really got into The Real World, mostly because I was living it. I think that was popular because it was like Friends but they hated each other. By 1997, shows like this had surpassed music, which only occupied 40 percent of MTV airtime.

In the 2000s, it was Jackass, Cribs, Punk’d, and The Osbournes. Ozzy was entertaining. The music had moved over to MTV2, VH1 and MTV Hits, leaving the main channel using less than 25 percent of its airtime for music by 2005. When The Real World ended in 2008, there was almost no music on Music Television. The music went to MTV Classic, while MTV became the home of nothing but cheap, steamy and stupid reality television.

With the merger of Paramount and Skydance, the business end of music and television has finally decided to lay most of MTV to rest outside the U.S.

To counter the rumors, MTV has not been canceled:

No. MTV was not “canceled,” but MTV is reportedly shutting down several well-known channels in the U.K. and Ireland, which was first reported by the BBC. Those channels are MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live, which will stop broadcasting on Dec. 31, 2025, the BBC said. It’s flagship channel MTV HD, which airs “Teen Mom” and “Geordie Shore,” will stay on air.

In the U.S., MTV is not shutting down, not that anyone will notice. The generation that grew up with MTV has long been abandoned, because as a business, we just weren’t giving them the ad eyeballs they needed. Those eyeballs are now on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. That’s where the artists have moved. But the high art of music television, highly produced, groundbreaking, is entirely gone. It’s been replaced by Mr. Beast, or live versions of Beavis and Butthead like MuffinJuice.

These days, I can find all the songs and videos I used to watch anytime and stream them on YouTube. The world has become instant, addicting, and brain-rotting. I sometimes pine for the days when you had to watch MTV to see when your favorite video would play again, and in the process, find new videos of bands I decided to listen to.

It’s true in media and human nature that Everybody Wants to Rule the World. For a time, MTV did rule the world. It was a good time. Even though Paramount/Skydance hasn’t fully pulled the plug, MTV has been dead for a long time. But it lives on in the hearts of us 80s kids like me because we’re the MTV generation.

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