MTV UNPLUGGED BOOK TV

But if MTV contributed anything meaningful to music culture outside of particular bands or genres, it certainly wasn't the VJ and it probably wasn't even the music video, which already existed and would survive being largely abandoned by the network as it became a more important pioneer of reality television than music television.

They did some interviewing, but even they admit in their own book that their interviews were of massively variable quality.Ĭertainly, MTV advanced particular artists and styles of music that would have been much worse off in the 1980s without it. Continuing to play videos like they did then would be a gamble on the viewer's patience and fondness for serendipity, both of which have taken a beating in the age of the MP3 player.Īnd the VJs themselves were substantially more inessential than DJs were on radio, because on video, the artist and song information was on screen (foreshadowing iPods and phones that display song titles, really), so you didn't even need them to tell you.

Commercial radio at least has the advantage of being well-suited to being on in the background at work or while you're in the car. There's a curious nostalgia around it now - 'Why don't they play videos anymore?' - but the answer is painfully obvious: anything you want to see, you can find on YouTube in ten seconds. The VJs were the part of MTV that was legacy media. The VJs who believed they were at the beginning of the age of the music video were actually at the end of the age in which innovation in music would involve giving people new ways to wait for you to play the music they wanted to hear. It's that the entire idea of ephemeral availability - that you would have to sit and wait for something to be played for you, and that at other times you had to do without it - is simply not how people expect to digest much of anything anymore. It's not just that this model of MTV largely went away, or that getting most of your music listening through the radio faded. That's what half the slumber parties of my adolescence were about: waiting for Michael Jackson or Duran Duran. It's hard to remember now, but at one time, MTV really was watched just like commercial radio was listened to: you would turn it on and see what came around, and if you particularly liked a video, you'd wait a while and hope you heard it. If you believed MTV was the future of music, you were looking over at this plugged-in box, and the future of music was over in that plugged-in box. In fact, aside from the fact that they were videos instead of records, nothing about the original MTV format was new, and the ability of television to disrupt the way people listened to music wound up being utterly dwarfed by the ability of personal computing to disrupt it.

MTV UNPLUGGED BOOK TV

She was envisioning a radio station being shown on TV and wondering what the VJs would do on camera while the songs were playing. Bands were experimenting with styles and directors, people who looked terrible on camera were seeing it matter for the first time, and one bad video (the Marks/Tannenbaum book has a fantastic, dishy, uproarious chapter about Billy Squier's ill-conceived 'Rock Me Tonite') could sink you.īut what turned out to be entirely retro - what turned out to be more of a last gasp than a next wave - was the initial structuring of MTV like a radio station and the idea of the 'VJ.' Martha Quinn herself says that when she first heard about MTV, she didn't understand that videos would be part of it.

Videos were rapidly growing in importance, after all. But when they get to talking about MTV itself, their stories seem awfully small.

They seem to be the last to know that 'I did cocaine with David Lee Roth' is no longer a particularly juicy thing to say, and neither is 'Steven Tyler hit on me once.' We assume these things. Unfortunately, much of the book either feels bafflingly irrelevant (who cares what Nina Blackwood voted for or whether Martha Quinn got good grades, really?) or like a much too late attempt to wring scandal from the idea of hanging out with rock stars.

Mtv unplugged book