I was watching 120 Minutes late, late Sunday night and my parents would have killed me if they caught me up all hours on a school night. I even had my boom box by my side so I could record the obscure tracks that college radio didn't play. The recordings always sucked though, way too much room noise.
MTV now dies, not with a bang but with a whimper, as they pull their channels off the air, leaving only the channel that features no music, airs no music videos, only reality TV shows. Sure, the deletion of MTV music videos from the airwaves is the end of an era, but it's an era that ended a long time ago.
Now when people want to watch music videos they go to TikTok and watch 30 seconds of a video with 30 seconds of a song and maybe go find the rest of it on YouTube. They might try to learn the dances, but they don't take up their guitars and learn the melody, they don't carve the lyrics into summer camp cabin walls, they don't get all obsessed with the band and cover their Army green surplus backpacks with Sharpie logos and pinned-on buttons in their honor.
MTV isn't being replaced, it has been replaced, it replaced itself with episodes of My Super Sweet Sixteen and The Real World and any tears we may have shed over its decline were shed then. The network was always intended to be a money maker, it ran blocks of what we now call content to be interspersed with ads.
I played music loud when my parents weren't home because I wanted the outside to feel like my inside. Pounding, driving, wanting, anguished. I jammed my boom box in the window and extended the antenna up between the panes so I could get in college radio out of Providence, RI.
Music was so full then, it was music intended to make us feel things we weren't supposed to feel in our little quiet lives, but we felt them anyway. Yeah, for sure teens always feel some kind of way. But we kids reared on MTV, latchkeys, and drinking from hoses always felt both at the pinnacle and at the end of things. We were always catching on too late, finding out too soon.
MTV was the thing capitalism gave us as a door prize and capitalism still has hold of it. You can't watch MTV anymore but you can buy their logo shirts at Walmart, Target, or Hot Topic. You can nostalgia max about it all you want.
We're all drowning in nostalgia anyway because everyone forgot how to make something new or even how to turn old things into something novel. Our current culture takes the recently new and turns it into itself, only worse. It hollows out the inside and gives us back surface with no substance over and over again.
MTV sold us a lifestyle that felt like it was worth living. Flannels and mini skirts, good hair cuts and minor keys, Super 8 camera footage and beat up Chuck Taylors, late night cigarettes on dark dance floors where the girls threw their heads back and all the boys hung their shoulders down. Either way, we all gazed at our shoes.
It wasn't until way later that we realized these lifestyles were simply the precursor to everything that destroyed our culture and brought it to its knees. We libertine late-night rule-breakers wanted our own freedom—and we got it—but we didn't demand it for everyone else. That happened later.
I'd like to say we knew that we needed the confines of the straight world in order to have something solid to push against, something well-built that would not give way. Once all of us got all together we pushed too hard and the whole thing came down. Now we're living in the wreckage.
MTV's death isn't imminent, it has passed. But it's bite-sized take on culture and teen life lives on in every TikTok dance, in every Insta reel, and in the hearts of every kid who wants a different life than the one they've been given. Of course you can always just rock the merch, in classic MTV fashion, and try to yearn for what you've got and not what's been lost for good.
