Reality Killed the TV Star: What led to the death of MTV?
For most kids growing up in the 1980s, MTV was the ultimate gateway to discovering new artists. While some of the fashions from that era may seem a little vapid today, many music videos transcended their medium, becoming high art compared to the disposable fluff that often dominated the radio. However, as time went on, the “M” in MTV—standing for “Music”—began to fade into the background, with the channel gradually shifting focus and, ultimately, collapsing in on itself.
Looking back on how the channel started, though, watching everything come together was almost endearing. The shows were often filled with errors and featured various veejays missing their cues whenever it was time to introduce the next song. However, looking at the visuals for a song like ‘Once in a Lifetime’ by Talking Heads or even ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by the Buggles, fans felt like they were watching something from the future.
By the time the channel had a better handle on what they were doing, that kind of exposure was enough to break musical acts on the channel. Although Prince and Madonna didn’t really need videos to become superstars, it certainly helped to see ‘The Purple One’ strut his stuff in the videos for ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ or to see ‘The Material Girl’ channel her inner Marilyn Monroe for the song of the same name.
Even when things got too stupid in the 1980s, they at least knew how to correct course. The incoming grunge movement didn’t have a set formula like hair metal, but the minute that ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ came out, the channel gained a whole new audience that was looking to catch shows like 120 Minutes or wait with bated breath as to whether or not they would play the video for ‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam.
But this is when some of the problems came in. Not every band was comfortable having their names in bright lights, and the fact that giants like Pearl Jam refused to make videos made it harder for programmers to figure out where to go. That meant making original content, but the debut of the show The Real World is probably the first critical blow to MTV’s credibility.
The idea of following people in a house and the drama that ensues may be fun in the moment, but the minute that everyone started tuning in, MTV figured that they might not even need the musical side of themselves at all. While there were still big names in rock, hip-hop, and pop in the 2000s, stars like Blink-182 and Snoop Dogg would often find themselves balancing their content with reality shows once the likes of Jersey Shore started rolling in.
And in the state that we know MTV today, none of them seem to care about the musical side of their content anymore. They still hold the MTV Awards every year, but it’s hard to take them seriously when most of the videos aren’t being shown on the network in between re-runs of Ridiculousness. If the music died down, though, that meant musicians found the next best thing: the Internet.
Around the time that everyone was figuring out who their favourite reality stars were, the biggest names in music were gaining traction on sites like YouTube, bringing their music to the people directly. Even though it may have seemed like a novelty at the time, it’s hard to think of a band like Radiohead releasing an album online for free with In Rainbows making that decision as a power move since they saw MTV dying an ugly death.
Since then, that’s led to the music world being like the Wild West, with artists having free reign to do whatever they want with their videos without catering to what the network wants, like Childish Gambino going all out for ‘This is America’. The only tragedy is that the days of veejays being the biggest names in the world are gone forever, thanks to the high-stakes drama happening on reality television. That’s probably not what the founders of MTV had in mind, but sometimes life takes turns no one was prepared for.
