Who Killed the Video Star: The Story of MTV | I Want My MTV!
2024-03-27 00:29:40
For nearly four decades MTV defined youth culture -- today it's a shell of its former self. What happened? How did MTV build a brand that stayed relevant to young viewers for decades, just to throw it all away? Who Killed the Video Star is a new 8-episode Audacy original about the rise and fall of MTV hosted by former MTV VJ, Dave Holmes.
As I told you in our last episode, until the very early 80s, television was a wasteland for young people. If you were too old for Scooby-Doo, but not old enough for Heart to Heart, there was nothing for you to watch. Until MTV came along.
In the first couple years of MTV, the network's audience is small, but they're young, and they're committed, and they're seeing something in it.
Living in Kalamazoo, Michigan, it was the outlet that I needed at a time when I felt like the outsider and nobody understood what a kind of a weirdo on the fringe I really was. So the minute I saw MTV, I had goals.
Now, yes, you do recognize that voice, and eventually I will tell you where you recognize that voice from. But as we pick the story back up, this is what's important. Just as MTV is beginning to mesmerize and inspire its first generation of viewers, it's on the brink of financial ruin.
Nobody really gave us a count of days or weeks, but it seems clear that MTV was one bad quarter away from being shut down.
In order to succeed, MTV is going to have to give up its rock and roll radio roots and give the kids what they really want. In this episode, we'll find out how they did it.
I'm Dave Holmes, and this is Who Killed the Video Star?
In the early 1980s, cable television was still pretty new. It covered about a third of the American homes that had televisions. And even if you did have cable, there was no guarantee your cable provider would even carry MTV at all. The network's ratings were low, it was having trouble getting advertisers, and rock and roll still scared the hell out of the old people who tended to make the decisions in the TV industry. So MTV had to take matters into its own hands.
The I Want My MTV promo campaign brought in the biggest names, Hall & Oates, David Bowie, Billy Idol. But, more importantly, it got kids calling their cable companies, just as they had been instructed to do. It was this groundswell of support from young viewers that really made the difference. MTV's ratings were still low, just under 2% of all American televisions would be tuned to it at any given time. But that number was growing, and they were getting better advertisers.
Atari, Pepsi-Cola, Pizza Hut, and the National Coffee Association.
Coffee gives you the time to dream it. Then you're ready to do it.
At the time, members of the young coffee generation got their music from the radio. There were three big radio formats for young people. There was Top 40, where you would hear the pop hits, Kenny Rogers and Sheena Easton, and Air Supply. There was Urban Radio, where pretty much all of the Black artists got their airplay. Rick James, Chaka Khan, Prince.
Then there was Rock Radio, sometimes just called FM. The early pitch for MTV was that it would be for television what FM was for radio. But Rock Radio in the early 80s was pretty stagnant. A lot of REO, Speedwagon. 38, Special.
Kansas. Decent to listen to, but when you added that visual component, as MTV did, it wasn't all that interesting to look at. Younger British bands like Spandau Ballet were up to the challenge. Here's Spandau Ballet's. Gary Kemp.
Kids were watching MTV thinking, who looks good? Well, it wasn't the American bands. It was the young British bands that were doing it. And the young British bands were making the videos. So MTV was lapping that up.
I think that's why there was that second invasion of America from the Brits, because we were so right and so ripe and ready for color videos in America. By 1982, MTV was beginning to bend the rules that it had made for itself. They played less of the rock bands of the moment, and more of the poppier, more interesting music of Spandau Ballet and the Human League and Duran Duran. But for the also more interesting music of Prince and Rick James and Chaka Khan, the wall stayed up. Here's Rob Tannenbaum.
The two guys who are programming MTV, Les Garland and Bob Pittman, they had come from FM radio. And the rule on FM radio was, we don't play black people. We play Jimi Hendrix. We also don't play a whole lot of women, but definitely not a lot of black people. When they were asked about it, their standard answer was, well, we don't discriminate against black people, but our format is rock.
So when there's a black group that makes a rock song, we'll certainly consider it. And that held true for about a year. But now they're playing Duran, Duran and ABC and Hall and Oates. Hall and Oates were huge on MTV. Hall and Oates is not a rock band.
It's R&B. It's black music sung by white people.
So they could no longer say, it's not us, it's the format, because it wasn't just the format. They had broken the format. They had expanded the format, just not in a way that included black artists. The whiteness of early MTV was conspicuous,
so much so that, in an interview with the network, David Bowie felt compelled to speak up.
I'd like to ask you something. It occurred to me, having watched MTV over the last few months, that it's a solid enterprise and it's got a lot going for it. I'm just floored by the fact that there's so few black artists featured on it. Why is that? I think that we're trying to move.
in that direction.
At the time, Michael Jackson's album Thriller was a legit phenomenon. Michael Jackson himself was the most visually dynamic pop star to come along since Elvis. But young.
viewers of MTV weren't seeing him. Initially, when Michael Jackson made the Thriller album and the videos went to MTV, they said, no, this doesn't fit the format. From the record company side, the story is, we sent these fantastic videos to MTV and they said no, and we pressured them, and they said no. And Walter Yetnikoff, who was the president of CBS Records, called up Bob Pittman. Walter was known for having colorful turns of phrase.
So, with a bunch of expletives added in, it was something like, if you don't play the Michael Jackson video, we are pulling every CBS video from your archives and you will not be allowed.
to play them. A boycott from CBS Columbia Records would mean no Fleetwood Mac, no Journey, no Adam and the Ants. And MTV still had a lot of airtime to fill. So, Billie Jean got into rotation on MTV.
and then Beat, It followed and the kids ate it up.
They put the videos on the air and ratings just shoot through the roof. I mean, they're doubling and tripling the best ratings they'd ever had. So, when you're programming, you have your principles behind what you program, but you also can't be stupid about audience response. The audience response was overwhelming. So, MTV said,
all right, we're going to play Michael Jackson. And then Michael Jackson and MTV and the art form of music video all took a massive step forward. My friend and fellow future, VJ Damian Fahey.
was sitting inches from the TV. My first memory, I would say, was the premiere of Thriller,
the Thriller music video.
The album Thriller had gone to number one, sold millions, had six top singles, and was beginning to move back down the charts. Michael wanted Thriller to be the biggest album of all time. So, he made a huge, ambitious music video for the album's title track and seventh single. He enlisted director John Landis, who had directed An American Werewolf in London. He spent a half million dollars on it, which was unheard of at the time, especially for a piece of work that could really only be seen on one channel.
Michael Jackson's Thriller, as it would be called, debuted in December of 1983.
My parents were artists, so they were big MTV fans when it came on, and they thought it was really cool. And so, they'd sit me down in front of the television, and I would just kind of stare at like the videos. And I remember sitting down, and I was like three feet, four feet away from the television, staring up at it and being scared out of my mind. A whole new bunch of kids like.
Damien went to the mall and bought the album. Thriller went back to number one. Its overall sales doubled. It was good news for Michael Jackson, but it was a lifesaver for a struggling MTV. More kids were watching the network than ever, mostly in hopes that they would catch something, anything from Michael Jackson.
Thriller raised MTV from the dead.
At around that same time, Lionel Richie's blockbuster second solo album, Can't Slow Down, was released.
Its first single, All Night Long, had a video directed by movie director Bob Rafelson. MTV added that video. The wall that kept Black artists out of MTV began to come down.
I'm not going to claim that Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie kicked down the doors and opened up MTV to all manner of Black artists. It wasn't true. It was still harder to get on the air if you were a Black artist. But it did change their way of thinking, kind of. Michael Jackson.
had saved MTV from itself, and MTV was beginning to listen to its audience and give them what they wanted. When we get back, we'll tell you how that change in strategy turned the network from a cult sensation into a pop culture juggernaut.
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By 1984, the one-two punch of Michael Jackson, and kids literally calling their cable companies to tell them they wanted their MTV, have increased the number of MTV households to over 25 million, up over a third from the previous year. MTV has navigated the bumpy early years,
and is beginning to become a phenomenon. MTV was on the cover of Time magazine. There was literally nothing hotter in pop culture at that point.
That's Doug Herzog. He would go on to run MTV, but he got his start there as a young executive in 1984, which just happens to be the greatest year in pop music history.
What I would say about MTV in 1984, it was the very peak of what I would call the music video era, right? So in the beginning, it was music videos, back to back to back to back. all day. There were promos, occasional concert. People weren't shooting many concerts in those days, no original programming, for the most part.
And it was a video music radio station. So 1984, to bring you back, there, was the summer of Prince's Purple Rain. It was the summer of the Michael Jackson and the Jackson's Victory Tour and Thriller, one of the biggest things ever. Bruce Springsteen's, Born in the USA, Madonna. That was what was happening in culture.
And I go back and I go, that was like the Mount Rushmore of music video.
By 1984, there's a micro-generation of pop artists who understand how to harness the power of music video. And these artists are ready for their close-up. Writer and host of the best show, Tom Sharpling, was watching as the age of Styx and Toto and Kansas gave way to something sexier.
There was a lot of less photogenic people making the cut. I mean, the first Madonna video that was burning up, if I remember correctly, I was obsessed. Oh my God, I thought that was the craziest, coolest thing I've ever seen was the burning up video. And I would just watch over and just waiting for them to play. And it was just clear, it wasn't in rotation nearly to what it would be once Borderline started.
That's like when Madonna really popped at MTV. But Burning Up was like this weird, kind of like hard rock song, with this woman laying in the middle of the street. And I was just like, I think that transformed me in a lot of ways.
Everyone between the ages of 12 and 24 is watching MTV all day long.
I watched everything that was on MTV. There was nothing. I didn't watch on it. It was like, I might like this less than something else. I'm still going to watch it.
Not like, oh, I'm out of here. That never happened.
And it's not just the music videos the kids are tuning in, for. The structure and the pacing are different from anything we had seen on television before.
In this day and age, it's easy to forget how slow things did move on television. It would be, here's the first act in a sitcom, and then here are six commercials, and then here's the next act in the thing, and here's six very normal commercials. And then here comes the newscaster saying, tonight at 10 o'clock, we're going to talk about this. Everything was speedwalking at best in terms of how fast these things were going. But then MTV suddenly was just like, no, your eyes are going to be darting all over the place, and you're going to be following us, and a thing's going to pop up, and another thing's going to pop up.
And then there's these five-second bursts saying that you're watching MTV. Now here's Billy Idol screaming at me, saying, oh, I'm watching MTV. It moved 10 times as fast as anything else on normal television up to that point. And as a kid, it was like a bullseye. for a kid to just be like, this is for you.
Early 80s. post-thriller MTV is so fundamental to the formative years of Generation X, you almost can't separate the two. It became a way for young people to connect with each other. And for a young Filipina immigrant named Karen Thompson, who had gone to be a professor of gender and sexuality studies at UCLA, it became a way to understand America.
We were newly moved to the United States from the Philippines in 1983.
. And my neighbor kid was like, you've not seen MTV come over. And so it was that. It was a kind of welcome to the US. It was welcome to try to adjust to a new peer group.
And here's this thing where, you know, they're like little mini movies from your favorite musical artists. And that was my introduction to it. And mostly also because Duran Duran, all the neighborhood girls were like, Duran Duran is awesome. You've never heard of Duran Duran? I was like, no.
And then that's, you know, that was also part of it. It was part of my induction into the economy of teen desire. It taught me two different things. So the act of watching it together and caring about what was on, and caring about the personalities and even caring about the little stingers that the different artists would do. I want my MTV.
You know, that was what it meant to be a part of US youth culture in the 80s, period. And if you didn't know what was up, you were kind of left out of it.
1984 is the first of many moments that you can fairly call peak MTV. And it's not just the artists and the viewers who are having the time of their lives. The staff are all hungry young people with a ton of enthusiasm and almost no television experience. Here again is former MTV executive, Doug Herzog.
You know, it's an office filled with mostly 20-somethings. You know, it wasn't a startup. You know, we didn't call it a startup back then. And they were three years in. But, you know, there was a startup vibe.
And it was a bunch of young people, all who loved music and television. We didn't have a lot of money, but we had a lot of freedom to experiment and try things and innovate. And, you know, honestly, it was as much fun as it sounds. It was the 80s. It was music.
It was television. It was rock and roll. There was sex. There was drugs and a lot of fun. Look, we all worked hard, but we partied hard.
And, as I always tell people, I would wish those days on anybody. And it was kind of Camelot-like.
As the network is blowing up, so is the original team of VJs. Tom Sharpling actually saw one in person.
I remember going to see the Thompson Twins at Radio City Music Hall because they were another huge MTV band. And then seeing Nina Blackwood was at the show. And I freaked. I was just like, oh my God, it's Nina Blackwood. It's amazing.
It's like a star sighting still moving me right now.
The original VJs are becoming superstars, but they still feel approachable. Like you actually knew them.
Because these people were like your friends. And they were telling you what was cool. And they're telling you that there's a new video by Dire Straits coming out this Friday. Get ready. They told you jump.
And then I said, how high? I used to listen to radio from a very, very early age. So I understood the bond that a listener has with a disc jockey or with a host. So I already had an understanding of that, to whatever degree. But then these people were showing up on your TV and you're seeing them.
And it's at a different level when you can see them.
Viewers didn't just want their MTV. They wanted to be their MTV. So the network grabbed onto another trend that was emerging among America's young adults. Break out the tanning butter and the lukewarm cans of bush beer. Because when we come back, we're going to Daytona Beach for spring break.
MTV is the hottest thing on television because it's paying attention to what its young audience wants to see. That audience has told them they want to see Black artists like Michael Jackson and Prince. They've told them they want to see female artists like Madonna and Cyndi Lauper. But a whole new television trend began when the network realized who their audience really wanted to see themselves. Here's original VJ Alan Hunter.
The spring breaks were really the first evidence that people wanted to see themselves on TV. And for us to go down and for a week shine a camera on the Bacchanal that was spring break and to have yours truly be the host and to interview Hawaiian tropic women and drunk guys in hotel rooms at night and to be part of the mix all day long, all night long. And to show that on television, it was just huge. People loved watching that. Alan Hunter here, a party reporter.
What do people do in between sunbathing during the day and going out at night? Hi, how are you? OK, fine. Thank you. Whoa.
Hi, are you taking a shower?
Like many, a fraternity boy after a daytime keg stand, the network used its time in Daytona Beach to experiment with its identity. They used that time and the cameras and the built in live audience of horny, drunk college students, and they tried out new show ideas. That's something that remained in the DNA of MTV. The network would still be doing it that way. when I joined the team 20 years later.
I talked about it with Sally Fertini Hess. She'd go on to be MTV's executive in charge of production.
There wasn't a pilot. There wasn't a focus group. There wasn't a team of, you know, network executives tearing apart your work because it had flaws. It was spring break. We did like crazy sports competitions, like slam dunk contest in pools.
Like it was really, you know, you can never recreate that, because the internet has changed all of that now. Right. And, you know, if you ever tried to do it again, you'd just have cell phones everywhere.
Now, listen, I'm not going to say that MTV spring break was as wild as it looked, but I will say this. I wrote a few of my MTV spring break stories in my book, and that phone call with the Random House legal department was long and truly terrifying. So a lot of them didn't make it in. Buy me a drink when you see me, and maybe I'll tell you some.
When my oldest was old enough to go on his first spring break, I think he wanted to go to Mexico. And I was like, you are not going on spring break to Mexico. He's like, mom, it's not that big of a deal. I'm like, oh, no, it's a big deal. I've been there.
I have seen it all. You are not going to Mexico.
In the summer of 1984, Prince releases the movie Purple Rain, in many ways, a feature length music video. The movie makes $70 million off a $7 million budget, and the soundtrack sells over 25 million copies. Bruce Springsteen drops the album Born in the USA. Its first single, Dancing in the Dark, has a video directed by legit Hollywood film director Brian De Palma. The song and the album become Bruce's commercial breakthrough.
The album sells over 30 million copies. Music video has become a medium to be taken almost seriously. An art form, kind of. But as we all know, an art form can't be fully taken seriously until its makers start giving each other awards on TV. And because nobody else was going to do it, MTV did it themselves.
The first Video Music Awards took place at Radio City Music Hall on September 14, 1984.
. Here again is Alan Hunter.
You know, the machine had such a flow to it, we were all very kind of compartmentalized. So when we got an executive, I forget which one it was, it came down to the studio and said, we're going to do an award show. And we thought, that's the coolest thing ever. You know, there's five hosts here. And so this new award show is going to be amazing.
What's my host gig, was our question. And when we got the script for the first draft, a couple of weeks away, the show was, and we're flipping through it like any good actor. looking for my part, looking to highlight all the massive lines I'm going to have. I come to find out I'm going to do a bumper to a commercial after Bette Midler in the balcony of the Radio City Music Hall. And that's my role.
Mark had the same issue. We all had these little tiny roles while Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd hosted the event, which we thought was amazing. But it's like, that's it? We were bummed. Three years into it, we'd helped establish MTV.
And look, no shade again on the executives, but you know, they're partying with record company executives. They're partying with celebrities in Hollywood. now. They were having more fun at a party than we were, I'm just here to say. I mean, that's the nature of the beast.
Even with Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler, it felt incredibly fresh and young at the time. It was an awards show for us, even though it followed the beats of the award shows that were made for our parents. Presenters included Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas of what they were still calling Jefferson Starship, Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy. And it featured a performance by a new artist called Madonna in a wedding dress, debuting a single that wouldn't even be released to radio for another six weeks, Like a Virgin.
The first VMAs also had some clunkers. Here's Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons.
OK, so, and when I think of great experiments, I think of Louis Pasteur, like they told me, Madame Curie. And she, excuse me, but your second marriage was an experiment as well.
They always blame the writers at award shows like, oh, the writers are making me do this stupid bit or say these stupid things that I can't read off the teleprompter. And it's always the writers. It's a thankless job. It really is. There's no glory in it.
Remember that familiar voice from the top of the episode? The one who watched MTV in Kalamazoo and said, I'm going to work there? Well, that is Tracy Grandstaff. And she did. She started in the promo department.
And within a few years, she would become the head writer for the Video Music Awards.
The biggest, funnest challenge for the writers room is trying to figure out the pairings that we're going to toss at you. It's Sandra Bullock and Eminem. Go.
A job at MTV, any job at MTV, was a dream for a young person. You'd be working with young, creative people, learning how to make television while you're making television. And then, if you got to work at the Video Music Awards, you'd be working with your idols.
You're being told, oh, suddenly you have to go interview David Bowie before he goes on. He's there with Iman. Can you handle that? Yeah. Uh-huh.
Cool. And Michael Jackson would be rehearsing for a couple hours. And you just get the chance to see that and have that audience while they're rehearsing. I mean, those are the moments where I go, that's kind of why I wanted to follow this trail to MTV. Because I knew it was going to provide these moments that you don't take for granted.
You feel so grateful for. And you can't believe your dumb luck.
Okay, so get this. Two nights after the first VMAs, a brand new one-hour drama called Miami Vice premiered on NBC. Miami Vice featured Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as sexy cops, taking down drug dealers and an art deco neon-lit South Beach to the music of Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel and Glenn Frey. Miami Vice was a huge hit right out of the box. It made the world safe for stubble, for pastel suits with t-shirts and no socks.
And the genesis of the entire show was a note that MTV programming director Brandon Tartikoff wrote to himself earlier in 1984.
. That note was two words long. It read MTV cops. MTV is so deeply ingrained in popular culture that now even network television is trying to copy it. As of 1984, it's officially MTV's world.
But in our next episode, as its success grows, MTV finds that, in order to stay on top, some of the rules of stodgy old network television are rules you actually have to follow. That's next on Who Killed the Video Star.
Who Killed the Video Star, the story of MTV, is written and narrated by me, Dave Holmes. Executive, produced by Jenna Weiss-Berman, Dave Holmes, Jim Weber, and Chris Cowan. Our story editor is Maddie Sprung-Kaiser. Produced by Lloyd Lockridge, Ian Mont, and Terrence Malengo. Edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil.
Production, support by Javier Cruces. Special thanks to J.D. Crowley, Maura Curran, Leah Reese, Dennis, Josephina, Francis, Kurt Courtney, Allison Jeffrey, and Hilary Schuff. Who Killed the Video Star, the story of MTV, is an Odyssey original.
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