My favorite MTV memory is Liquid Television. Weird cartoons like Aeon Flux and The Maxx and The Head
Mine is definitely Beavis and Butthead. That came much later, but I was just old enough to get beer and my friends and I would sit around, drinking beer watching Beavis and Butthead, and laughing our asses off. Yeah! Yeah! Cool.
I rewatched Beavis & Butthead Do America a few months back and laughed from start to finish. Mike Judge is a goddamn genius
For a long time whenever I wanted to mock creepy behavior I’d say “I see you wear braces. I wear braces too.” In Butthead’s seduction voice. People usually had no idea what I was referencing, but I got a kick out of it, and it was always pretty fun when someone got it.
Honestly kinda sad I missed the “golden years” of MTV. I didn’t grow up with cable or satellite TV; so my sister and I would watch the shit out of Nickelodeon, cartoon network, discovery and animal planet when we were on vacation or at our grandparents house. However, I grew up with my parents waxing poetic about how MTV used to have the best music and they would have (supposedly) gotten a cable or satellite connection if only MTV still showed music videos.
Looking back it was obvious bullshit and they wouldn’t have gotten a subscription even if MTV only played their favorite bands and music videos; but at the time it meant I was always hoping MTV would start showing music videos again so my parents would get cable and my sister and I could watch cartoons, science, nature, history and engineering shows.
I still prefer the MTV premier date as the line between Gen X and Millennials No specific date is going to be great at describing generations anyway, and its a fun landmark.
Back in the 90s our school had one room with a permantently installed TV set. Class was taking part in this room once a week. When we all behaved - and we did! - we were allowed to watch MTV in this room for the last remaining 15 minutes of the lesson. It was the time where boy groups and Euro Dance music was at its peak. For us 5th or 6th-graders this was the most important thing every week.
MTV was really great in the 80s. Sorry it went downhill so fast and so long… It’s really insane that they can’t just make a channel with all music videos. Call it OG MTV or something.
I found a channel recently, I think within the Roku channel, that plays nothing but old MTV videos.
It was no more than a couple weeks ago that I found it, but I’m not sure if I can find it again.
Nonetheless, it’s out there somewhere.
Edit: It’s in the Roku channel. Go to the music category and it’ll take you to music videos galore. Some are playlists of thirty hours or so, some are live. I see seventies, eighties, nineties, and 2000s along with different genres.
Neat! Thanks for the tip. I’ll check it out.
Last time I had cable there were channels with music only they were like channel 674574 or some shit tho
Too bad it doesn’t still exist. Its just a empty filler channel and has been for over a decade.
thatsthejoke
Weird, a couple of years ago, it was only 10 years. They crammed 4 years of music into two years apparently.
Well that one specifies good music. So apparently for 4 years they still had music, it was just bad music.
Now let’s do Rolling Stone!
More like 2.
They did give at least a solid twelve years of music. The best unplugged episodes were in the early nineties.
The early 90’s is also when they started showing less and less music and more shit like The Real World, Road Trip and Beavis & Butt-Head. Even when I was a kid and saw Nirvana’s Unplugged set (arguably the best episode of Unplugged), the saying that “MTV doesn’t have music videos” was already a popular joke.
Beavis and Butthead were riffing on music videos for almost half the show though at least. Sometimes was the best part
True. The modern ones feel weird to me with them instead riffing on The Jersey Shore or TikTok videos.
I think my favorite one was for Black Hole Sun.
“Hey, Butt-Head, what’s a black hole?”
“Uhh… It’s like a big bunghole in space that grinds everything up into diarrhea.”
…at least through ninety-five they still ran music videos overnight and weekly themed shows (120 minutes, headbanger’s ball, MTV raps) at specific timeslots, but by the mid-nineties music videos had been relegated to graveyard-shift filler as the network increasingly focused on conventional programming…
…fourteen years is a pretty fair assessment, methinks…
I love the series. I still regularly watch/listen to a couple of gigs.
KISS Unplugged is simply awesome. And Pearl Jam. And Alice in Chains. And… sigh good times, man.
no they didn’t
Obligatory response video
