Who hosted MTV’s first broadcast?
As label executives phone in their latest crop of young talent, asking them the dreaded question, “How are those TikToks coming along?”, they must be left wondering where this evil chain of events started. Besides the zombies of popstar fame, most musicians picked up their instrument for the first time with a humble ambition of laying down their own recorded track. But as their talent developed and the eyeballs of the industry began to gaze, their simple songs had to have a music video and become so much more.
Before the days of 90-second reels, the music video ruled supreme. In the opulent 1980s, the budgets for these projects were, at the time, astronomical, given the more general lucrative nature of the music industry at that time. In fact, for ‘Bad’, Michael Jackson hired Martin Scorsese and spent a whopping two million dollars on the video. It set off a chain of events in the industry with the likes of Madonna, Guns N’ Roses, and MC Hammer dropping similarly priced videos around the same time.
Naturally, the music industry capitalised on a growing gap in the market. MTV launched on August 1st, 1981, and became a centralised place for music videos to air for wanting music fans. Completely transforming the way music was consumed, artists had to become rounded multimedia stars and understand how they could market both themselves and their music to a visual audience.
You could understandably attribute the genesis of this channel to the development of many of the toxic and shallow attitudes within the last few decades. But, whether you like it or not, it transformed the landscape. After The Buggles opened proceedings with their video for the aptly named ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, the megastars flooded the channel with their “content”.
However, the channel gave way to the emergence of more than just music stars. It provided music journalists and broadcasters with a platform to catapult their careers through the opportunity to host on the channel. On the first-ever airing of the episode, after footage of the Columbia orbiter launch and the launch of Apollo 11 was shown, which led to revealing The Buggles to a broadcast audience, John Lack delivered the iconic opening line of “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”.
Lack’s words are forever embedded within the introduction of MTV to the world, but the role of the show’s first visual broadcaster was reserved for someone else. Alan Hunter is the first face and voice we see in an MTV live segment, quickly followed by the first five VJs: Martha Quinn, JJ Jackson, Nina Blackwood, and Mark Goodman.
The first official introduction was handed to Goodman, who delivered a truly foreshadowing line to the live audience, saying, “Starting right now, you’ll never look at music the same way again.” I wonder what Goodman is thinking now.
What video featured most on MTV?
The very fact that Michael Jackson felt comfortable enough to hire Scorsese to direct ‘Bad’ was because of the success he was riding from his previous record. On Thriller, Jackson explored new visual realms with the title track by filming a 15-minute short film directed by John Landis that cost half a million dollars. Following the television premiere, it gave the channel one of its biggest audience draws to date.
Not only did the album become the best-selling album in history, but the documentary for it sold over a million copies, making it the best-selling VHS tape at the time. The definitive records are relatively sketchy, but it’s widely considered that ‘Thriller’ is the most-played video in MTV history, being run a reported six times an hour the year it came out.
Jackson altered the landscape of music videos at the time and gave MTV an avenue for competitive stars to explore. Madonna followed Jackson’s lead by recruiting acclaimed director David Fincher to direct her video for ‘Vogue’, which is reported to be the second most-played video in MTV’s history.
