Happy 30th Birthday MTV: You Suck Now But You Were Great Back Then

MTV Music Television debuted 30 years ago today by famously playing The Buggles' “Video Killed the Radio Star."

Looking back, 'twas not video that killed the radio star, but digital file sharing many years later. In fact, MTV made many radio stars, including Madonna, Duran Duran, Peter Gabriel and Dire Straits.


If you are younger than 40 it would be hard to understand what MTV was like back in the day. It was a huge deal when it joined your cable lineup and you couldn’t stop watching it. It was sort of like the dawn of TV itself. Before that, the only way to see an artist would be if they showed up on a talk show or something late at night like SNL or the Midnight Special. And there was much more mystery about the artist as a result.

Someone like David Bowie, for example seemed super exotic and enigmatic because he rarely mingled with mainstream entertainment. So when he shared the couch on the Dinah Shore show with The Fonz and Nancy Walker in 1975, he really was like the man who fell to earth.


I was thinking about my favorite videos from the MTV glory days and I immediately thought of "Close to the Edit" by the Art of Noise. This band was a project by Trevor Horn, the uber-producer behind Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Yes comeback of "Owner of a Lonely Heart." He had even sang for Yes for one record called Drama in 1980. But beefore that he was in, you guessed it, The Buggles.

The "Close to the Edit" video, directed by Zbigniew Rybczynski, portrays some sort of postapocalypitic, subterranean landscape populated with angry little people and chainsaw wielding maniacs dressed in black tie. It creeped me out in the Reagan era and it still does today. Happy Birthday MTV - you suck now but you were great back then.


What is your favorite MTV video of all time? RT wants to know - leave a comment below.