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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too.
And we're just a few MTV generation babies hanging out talking about MTV on this MTV episode of Stuff You Should Know About MTV.
I'll be able to do that with my dying breath.
It's so ingrained in my head.
Yeah.
I mean, how can you not picture Neil Armstrong jumping off onto that moon?
Yep.
With an MTV flag?
For sure.
And like a multi-changing MTV flag that's just drawn over the American flag.
It's just iconic.
Yeah.
But, hey people, the answers to who wrote that song and who came up with that idea, they're all in this jam-packed episode about MTV, where we are surely going to wax nostalgic.
I think it would be impossible not to.
As a matter of fact, I challenge us to try not to be nostalgic in this episode.
I've already ruined it.
I just air guitarred the MTV theme.
We'll exclude that.
OK.
So we're talking about MTV.
I don't think there's many people out there who don't know what MTV is.
It's a global juggernaut, or it certainly was at one point in time.
But for those who may not be familiar, MTV stood for music television.
And it was what most people consider the first network dedicated to playing music videos.
It's not true.
But it's close enough that you might as well just say, fine, we'll go with that as the definition.
Yeah, for sure.
And this was not the beginning of music videos.
MTV did not create the music videos.
They just were the first channel.
Well, that's not even true either.
So I'm just going to shut up now.
Some people point to the song Chantilly Lace from 1958 from the Big Bopper as maybe the first music video, because it was not just a film of a band playing their song, but there was some performative theatrics to it.
I saw one earlier by 16 Years with Cab Calloway doing Minnie the Moocher.
Yeah.
Well, the Beatles are who people usually point to.
It's kind of starting out the music video thing where they showed the band doing other things and they were a little more elaborate and had different scenes.
And you could see those on Top of the Pops on BBC or the Ed Sullivan show.
And then that Bohemian Rhapsody video from Queen from 1975 was one of the big ones.
And they expressly did that so they didn't have to lip sync a performance on Top of the Pops.
And that's a full eight years before MTV came out.
So that was like a definitive music video that they played on MTV for like decades to come.
It was just a great video.
But it also kicked off something really important that led to MTV, which was it became kind of standard in the recording industry to create a music video for maybe the top single or something of a big album that a big act was coming out with to use as a marketing or promotional tool.
So apparently Queen kicked that off with the Bohemian Rhapsody video.
Yeah, for sure.
There were some countries had, like you know, music video shows that would be on maybe late night or something on a weird station.
New Zealand had a radio with pictures in 1976.
A little on the nose.
The USA Network.
And I do remember this.
In 1978, they had a show called Video Concert Hall.
Oh, yeah.
Uh yeah, I remember I didn't like sit there glued to it like I did MTV, cause I was still just seven years old and I think it was a late night thing.
Um, but it was really, you know, the MTV story goes in lockstep with the story of cable television.
Um, by the way, big thanks to Olivia for this, and a little hint uh, upcoming.
On Thursday we're going to round it out with an episode on VH1.
What?
Yes.
You knew that?
For real?
You didn't know that?
No.
Yeah, I told you in an email.
Let's do MTV and BH1 this week.
I must have missed that.
All right.
Well, I'm glad you're talking about MTV.
We'd be in bad shape.
For real.
But the rise of cable, as like 10 million subscribers in 1975 to 40 million in 1985, that was really what grew.
MTV, was cable being a thing and the US government saying hey, cable.
It's a little looser.
You can kind of do a little more and then cable companies saying hey, maybe we should start thinking about kind of different kinds of channels we've never had before.
Yeah, because there were a lot more channels that the FCC opened up on the bandwidth, where before it was just over-the-air channels, and those were full.
So don't even ask.
Shut up.
The networks have those locked down.
When cable opened, it was like, what do you want to do?
You want to make a channel all for kids?
Great.
Let's found Pinwheel and then eventually call it Nickelodeon.
You want to show reruns?
We'll call it Nick at Night.
You want to show little kids, even smaller kids programs?
Great.
We'll make a channel called Nick Jr.
What else do you want?
And people said, we got enough Nickelodeon.
Let's think of something else.
And one of the other things that was thought of was something called the Movie Channel.
And there was a guy named Bob Pittman who was working on it.
And he happens to be the CEO of iHeartMedia.com. who we work for.
And he's one of the big players with the founding of MTV and is usually the person that people will tell you who know about this kind of thing.
If you ask him who founded MTV, the answer will usually be Bob Pittman.
And that is true to an extent, but he wasn't alone.
One of the other founders, who is sometimes called the architect of MTV, was already a very famous person by the time MTV came out.
Are you talking about Mike Nesmith?
I am.
Okay.
This was in 1975.
Mike Nesmith of the TV show and the musical group The Monkees.
He made a pilot called Pop Clips, which was backed by TV production legend and juggernaut Norman Lear.
And it was, you know, it was basically proto-MTV.
They had comedians introducing music videos like promotional videos that these record companies were making.
Right, right.
And there was a guy named John Lack.
I don't think we mentioned that Time Warner Cable Corporation was one of the early cable companies, that was.
They launched Nickelodeon.
They're kind of experimenting around.
And in 1979, American Express bought half of that.
And that new company, John Lack worked for.
He was the COO and he ran Nickelodeon.
And Nickelodeon did very well.
And he eventually hooked up with Bob Pittman who, like you said, was developing the movie channel, which I sorely miss.
The movie channel was great.
That was my favorite one, too.
I don't know why, but it was my favorite.
Because it was only movies.
Yeah, I guess so.
I bet you that was it.
Because for a kid, even though HBO was great, they had other stuff.
And as a kid, you were like, I just want movies.
And that's what the movie channel was.
I just want to see Outland.
What's the problem?
Oh, man.
You ain't kidding.
So Bob was running that.
John Lack came to Bob and said hey, what do you think about doing something if you're doing this movie-only channel?
What about a music-only thing?
And so Bob Pittman said, great, let's call it TV One.
And they went, oh, no, that's already a thing.
And he went, all right, how about TVM, like TV music?
And everyone went, well, what about MTV?
We think that sounds a little better.
And he said, all right.
Yeah.
And don't don't feel bad for Mike Nesmith.
He wasn't like squeezed out or they didn't steal his idea.
He was invited to be a part of the whole thing and he was not interested.
He has always considered himself an artiste and didn't want to get into the corporate nitty gritty of it.
So he said, just buy me out.
And I'll go along my way.
But he did essentially kind of come up with the concept and the format.
And then Pittman and Lack took it over with a couple of other guys Fred Siebert and Alan Goodman whose experience I think up to that point had been working together at a Columbia University student radio station.
So these people were all young, pretty hip.
It's the early 80s.
And again, the idea that there are promotional music videos already in existence out there and that the record companies give them away for free was the basis of where MTV and all of the other like music video programs came from.
Because you could make this thing on the cheap because again, record companies were giving these things away for free and saying yes, play them via Condeos.
It will only help us if you play these things on TV.
Yeah, I remember when I met Bob for the first time in New York at the iHeart offices.
Our boss, Connell, took me by.
I think we had an official meeting with him, but I was like Connell, I've got to say something about MTB.
I said, is that verboten?
Is that not the kind of thing?
He's like, oh, no, man.
He's like, you should definitely say something.
And I met Bob, and I was like, Mr. Pittman, I said, I just want to let you know.
I was like, I was the guy.
I was that kid who sat there at 10 years old, glued to my television, watching MTV as many hours as I was allowed to consume it.
I was like, I was that kid.
And he was like, you know, he said, we counted on you and everyone like you doing that same thing.
Otherwise, it would not have been a success.
So he thanked me, which I thought was very cool.
Well, you have to finish the story all the way.
What was the end?
That he came around his desk with tears in his eyes and embraced you for a good minute, Connell said.
No, no, no, no.
He did not.
But I think I touched him maybe a bit.
I don't know.
Who can tell?
He sent me a bottle of tequila one Christmas, so.
I got one of those, too.
Oh, we'll see, I guess.
You didn't make him cry, though, did you?
No, but I touched him.
That's right.
So he hires these kids from the radio station, like you mentioned.
They've got these videos.
They need the other stuff.
They need the logo.
They need the theme song.
They need the stuff in between the music videos, not only just the cast, which we're going to talk about but, you know, like the video bumpers and stuff like that.
So they brought in, again, teams of friends to do this stuff.
Yeah, there was, I guess, a guy named Frank Olinsky who was a friend of Fred Siebert.
Remember one of the Columbia radio station guys.
And he was creating a design studio and he created the logo and apparently just got it right out of the gate.
Like it was there were not many iterations of it.
Like he just nailed it.
And there are very few logos that are more recognizable than MTV.
In part because it spells out the name in the logo, so you kind of know exactly what the logo is for, but it's still pretty recognizable.
It's a great logo.
It really is.
And then the musical riffs, including the one that you did at the top of the podcast...
Those were created by a couple of guys named Scott Elias and Jonathan Peterson, and they based it on The Kinks.
You Really Got Me.
Yeah.
It's, you know, similar, I guess.
Yeah.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, you can definitely tell when you hear that, but I never thought like The Kinks rip off, you know.
Yeah.
And then that Moon Man, the moon landing became as sort of tied to MTV as anything else.
And is it because? they thought, hey, we're also embarking on a journey not yet known?
Sure.
Is it because it was one small step for television and a giant leap for the music industry?
Of course.
Was it also because that stuff was public domain and rights-free?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
If the US government, which NASA is an agency of the US government, the US government owns something.
You all own it too, as an American.
It's in the public domain, buddy.
One of the other reasons though, that I saw was that they were trying to basically say, like this is as monumental a cultural event as landing on the moon was.
Yeah, for sure.
They initially had a version with Neil Armstrong.
And I could swear I remember hearing, you know, one small step for me, one giant leap for mankind.
And I guess I watched the first few days.
I mean, I know I did.
So that must have leaked in there because I definitely remember hearing that version.
But Neil Armstrong came forward and he was like, no, no, no, no, no.
Like that may be in the public domain, but that's my voice.
You can't use my voice.
So John Lack said he replaced that by saying a recording of himself.
Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.
And that was it.
Apparently, after the challenge disaster, that branding ended in 1986.
But yeah, I didn't know that.
I know the moon man is still the VMA trophy.
So maybe just parts of it continued on.
I don't know.
I could see them taking it off the air temporarily, because I definitely remember seeing it too, I would guess after 1986.
I thought so.
Yes, I could see the Challenger disaster happening and being like let's just not do anything space-related right now.
Yeah.
What about the taglines?
You had a couple of those early on too, right?
The idents, you mean?
Oh, the taglines.
Sorry.
Yeah, apparently it was, you'll never look at music the same way again.
Pretty fun.
On cable, in stereo.
Yeah.
Yeah, they're okay.
That and, Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock and Roll.
They just sound like they're delivered by somebody wearing rainbow suspenders maybe.
Just real, like, late 70s, early 80s kind of branding stuff.
Yeah, yeah, I could see that.
But what about the Idents, the identifying, I guess, snippets?
I'm not sure what the actual TV trade name is for them.
I think I called them bumpers earlier.
I'm not sure what the trade name is either.
But I don't know where you're headed here, so take it away.
Oh, well, it's like station branding showing you what network you're watching.
And MTV became really famous for all sorts of weird and bizarre ways of showing like are you watching MTV?
Like, one of the really famous ones that I remember was MTV.
It was a guillotine suddenly coming down and you had no idea what was going on.
It was just the whole thing started on a shot of a guillotine blade falling.
And then all of a sudden in the basket or on the floor of the gallows or wherever a head falls down, and the head is in the shape of the M, There's two eyes and like a tongue sticking out.
And it's this really weird, unsettling claymation head, but it's the MTV logo.
Yeah, you know we did.
If anyone saw our short run of the Stuff You Should Know TV show, we had some very I think it was almost like an homage some very similar bumpers that came in and out of commercial break for our TV show.
That were animations done by our friend Russ.
Yeah.
Who did a phenomenal job.
They're just like, it's one of the coolest things about that show still, I think.
Yeah, and also if you want to see some MTV eye dents, there's something on YouTube titled Creepy MTV Eye Dent and Logos Collection 1990s.
And it's, I think, like 25 minutes of these 10-second clips.
Amazing.
I'll have to check that out.
Yeah, you definitely should.
Sorry I didn't send it to you.
Oh, that's okay.
No, it's not, Chuck.
I'm sorry.
On August 1st, just after midnight, 1981 is when MTV formally premiered, sort of.
I mean, I guess it did formally appear, but unless you lived in just parts of New Jersey then you wouldn't see it, because there was only one cable operator who even carried it at the time.
And the cast even had to pile in a rented school bus to drive to Fort Lee, New Jersey, at a bar called The Loft, because they knew that they would have it there.
And in what is now the most tired and obvious trivia question of all time, probably the very first video to play.
And I'm not making fun of you if you didn't know this, but it's just it feels like one of those.
It's like, oh my God.
Everybody knows that the Buggles video killed the radio star was the first MTV video.
Yeah, which is appropriate.
Video killed the radio star.
Although it did quite the opposite, though.
It actually made the radio star into even bigger stars, as we'll see.
Unless you weren't good at videos.
No, or you didn't want to make a video.
You're basically making a massive career choice right then in the 80s and 90s to just basically be like no, I don't want to be that huge.
So I'm not going to play MTV's game.
Yeah, I think the question now at Bar Trivia should be everybody knows that Video Killed.
The Radio Star was the first music video played on MTV.
What was the second?
Oh, do you know?
Because I don't have that list.
It was Pat Benatar, You Better Run.
In that first 24 hours, there were 116 unique videos for 209 total plays.
So, yes, there were plenty of repeats.
The Pretender's Brass in Pocket, the Who You Better You Bet was the first one to be repeated.
Rod Stewart had – this is shocking –
On the very first day of MTV, Rod Stewart had 11, not just videos playing.
He had 11 different videos playing for 16 total plays.
Yeah, that's amazing.
And your boys Iron Maiden were in that first – they were in the top 20, buddy.
Number 16 was the song Iron Maiden.
Yeah, and then later on they played Wrathchild, too.
So they had two videos in the first 24 hours.
Yeah.
So I mean, if you kind of put all those together, what you're seeing is a very, very varied lineup, even though they were replaying stuff like Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight – and, Just Between You and Me, by April Wine.
Those were each played five times on the first day.
But, you know, they had a... What's it called when you don't have a lot of stuff in stock?
Problem?
I don't know.
A big problem?
A supply problem.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, yeah, it was so varied.
I saw that they played the video for Andrew Gold's Thank You for Being a Friend, which went on to become the Golden Girls theme.
That was the 54th video played on MTV ever.
And they only played it once.
But who was playing this?
VJs.
They had to start out with an initial lineup of VJs.
Bob Pittman very much had, I think it was kind of breakfast clubby.
He wanted very specific archetypes of youngish people.
He said, we need a black person, which was J.J.
Jackson, 41 years old, by the way.
So he was sort of the old guy for the 10-year-old that was watching.
Wow.
We need a girl next door, which was Martha Quinn, 22 years old.
I think she was the youngest.
We need a sexy little siren.
Clearly, Nina Blackwood.
We need a boy next door.
That would have been Alan Hunter.
And then we need some hunky Italian looking guy with curly hair.
And that was, of course, Mark Goodman.
And I think Mark Goodman was the first VJ on.
Oh, I thought it was Alan Hunter.
I'm pretty sure it was Mark Goodman.
I watched like there are all sorts of videos of, you know, the first hour, the first two hours, the first whatever hours of MTV.
And I watched the first little bit of it.
And I'm pretty sure it was Mark Goodman who was first.
Oh, okay.
Well, we'll find out eventually one day.
I did see that I think VH1 rebroadcast the first 24 hours of MTV once not too many years ago.
Oh, well, that's fun.
Yeah, just as like a, hey, guys, we like you over here.
And also, I'm a semi-recent subscriber to SiriusXM.
Oh, yeah?
I don't know why I resisted for so many years.
Maybe I just didn't know as much about it, but I love it.
It's great.
It's fun to have somebody curating music and not constantly for me at least be sitting around going like, oh God, what do I want to listen to?
I can't think of anything.
What can I play? and it's great and they got great channels this is not an ad for them but i i really really am enjoying it and there are a few shows on a few stations from those those vjs i think martha quinn has a show oh yeah yeah uh alan hunter has one mark goodman i think nina blackwood used to i'm not sure if martha good uh quinn still does but yeah it's it's cool to and i didn't even know like i'll just be listening to a cool station and it's like mark goodman pops up it's nice I feel like they owe you at least a free month or a hat, a baseball cap at least.
Yeah, it happened a free year.
Okay.
Yeah, so did you finally cave when the offer for how much it would cost you a month kept going down and it got into like the 150 area?
Yeah, and that's sort of the ticket.
You just wait for a good deal.
First 12 months are like five bucks or something.
And they said, well, there goes your free year, Chuck.
A couple of comedians early on that went on to be noteworthy were rejected.
Richard Belzer, which is hysterical to think of him as an MTV VJ.
He was so cool, though.
I love Belz.
And then Carol Leifer was a comedian who later went on to write for Seinfeld.
Yes, she did pretty well for herself.
Yeah.
The thing is, in retrospect today, you're like, yeah, MTV was huge.
Not at first.
Like you said, basically, Fort Lee, New Jersey was the first and only place to have access to MTV.
And, like you said, New Jersey was the only place.
Just a few small parts of New Jersey was the only place where you could see MTV.
So it wasn't out of the gate, like a sure bet that MTV was going to become a huge cable juggernaut.
And...
To kind of help spread the word that there was such a thing as MTV, an ad agency called the LPG Pond Agency very wisely came up with the I Want My MTV campaign.
And I remember seeing those on MTV.
But they were originally designed to play on other networks, to get people watching at home to call their cable operator and say, hey man, I want my MTV.
And it worked.
Yeah, I mean basically any musician that came through the MTV office and studio.
I think they just had like a standing set where they could say just go in there and, however you want to do it, say I want my MTV.
And that's why they were also kind of fun and varied and clearly off the cuff.
But it became part of their branding such that the...
One of my favorite groups, Dire Straits, in 1985 immortalized it via Sting as a guest singer, singing I Want My MTV at the beginning of the song Money for Nothing, which would also become a huge, huge music video.
Uncredited guest, I think, even.
Meaning they didn't pay him?
No, they didn't say, and sting, ladies and gentlemen.
What?
Like in the song?
Yeah, that's what I would have expected.
Who does that?
Like before Dolly Parton's verse in Islands in the Stream.
Kenny Rogers just goes, and now Dolly Parton.
I could totally see that.
He would pull it off too.
He totally could have.
So one of the things that also helped the channel spread, especially by word of mouth among their target market, which was teens, especially teens who got fat allowances from their parents, is that some conservative places were like we're not carrying this MTV.
And they made the terrible mistake of actually publicizing that they weren't going to carry MTV.
And they were like Christian organizations.
The Parents Music Resource Center would kind of get in the crawl of MTV but simultaneously give it really good press.
Right.
Because if your parents didn't want you watching it, you definitely wanted to watch MTV.
Yeah, absolutely.
And, you know, I mentioned that supply problem.
I do have a number here.
Thanks to Livia.
There were only 250 videos at first.
So if you look at the math, they played 209 videos on the first day.
So they sort of spent their allowance almost fully on that first day.
So for a long time. you were seeing videos repeated heavily in heavy rotation.
And even once they had you know, it was sort of like the radio like the ones that were hit got played more, even when they did have the supply.
I, friend, did a little bit of math.
Oh, God, it's always my favorite part.
At an average of three minutes per video, which I think is a good average.
They would have to start over every 12 hours.
Oh, if they just didn't repeat ones and they just played their whole supply?
Yeah, the whole WOD.
Yeah.
One thing though, there was this, there's a documentary out on Devo that's really good on Netflix.
Oh, I still haven't seen it.
It's really good, I think.
And they really kind of talk a lot about how Devo so Devo.
In the early days they were an art collective as much as a band.
Yeah.
And so they made quirky, weird films for their songs.
So they were making music videos before MTV.
Yeah.
And they didn't have anywhere to show them.
And then MTV came along and Devo helped make MTV.
They gave them more really good videos that people wanted to see.
And then as MTV got bigger and bigger and more and more commercial, Devo got left to the wayside.
Forgotten, you could say.
It's actually kind of sad as things just kind of start to go downhill for the band.
But that was a big point that they made.
And I think something overlooked that there were a lot of interesting pioneering groups that were making videos even before MTV came along, that MTV digested and fed itself on and grew big on.
And then they just got left because all of a sudden, Kip Winger was like oh, if I take my shirt off and tease my hair out, put a little Aquanet in there, I can make a video too.
And they're like, no, no, no, it's not quite that easy.
We need to film it in black and white video.
And then you'll have a video.
He's like, okay, let's do it.
And Kip Winger's like, yeah, but like, don't you understand?
My song's about 17-year-old girls.
Yeah, it really is.
There's no getting around it.
The only one that's worse or more blatant than that is Benny Madrone's.
No, his is End of the Night, where he's like trying to spring, like a middle schooler or something like that, from her parents' house.
Oh, I don't remember that.
If I could fly, I'd pick you up and take you into the night.
Oh, I know that song, yeah, yeah.
And show you love.
It's a great song.
That sounds super creepy.
You just can't stop and think about what he's saying.
Yeah, or watch the Lionel Richie video for Hello.
Is it me you're looking for?
It's kind of a sweet song, but in the video he's like a teacher that's seemingly stalking a blind student.
Right.
And a sculptor, right?
An art teacher?
Yeah, I think so.
It's one of those at the time you're like, oh, that's sweet.
Now you're like, oh my God, like fire that teacher.
Right.
There's a lot of 80s and 90s media that's like that.
Yeah.
One thing I did want to say when you were talking about Devo.
Like I can say for sure that 10-year-old Chuck would not have known about Devo or the Talking Heads.
Right.
Or like, do you remember the Art of Noise video?
Yeah.
Oh, like the super cool animation?
It was like herky-jerky stop motion with chainsawing mannequins.
What was the name of the song?
Like I was listening to top 40 radio.
And then in a couple of years my brother-in-law would start feeding me Southern rock and Leonard Skinner and almond brothers and stuff like that.
And like, there's no way I would have been listening to any artsy stuff like that.
Cause that didn't come along for me until I started listening to alternative music in like the ninth and 10th grade.
You know, and I think a lot of people out there would be like well no Chuck, you would have heard Devo on the radio, or you would have heard- I doubt it.
Maybe Talking Heads.
Maybe Talking Heads, right.
The point is, is the reason you heard those on the radio is because of MTV, right?
Because when it became clear that if you gave MTV promotional videos for free and they played them, you were going to start selling records in that cable operators region.
That's just what happened.
It became very clear, very quantifiable early on that where MTV played a song, and it didn't matter if it was a well-known band or someone you'd never heard of, those records were going to sell in local record stores.
And from that point on, MTV was basically, it had its path set out for them.
Yeah.
Devo is so good.
If your only experience with Devo is the Satisfaction, the Rolling Stones cover or Whip It, both of which are great songs.
Yeah.
Like do yourself a favor and just dive in.
It's amazing music.
I love Devo.
And shout out, of course, to Akron, Akron, Akron and Firestone High School.
Chuck, we're 30 minutes in and we haven't taken an ad break yet.
I thought we took one.
No?
I don't think so.
Did we?
Let's ask Jerry to rule on this.
Jerry?
You have not.
Okay.
All right.
Jerry verified.
And hopefully we can leave that in there, Jerry's voice.
I don't know if she's going to be okay with it or not, but this one's clearly going to be supersized.
So maybe 30 minutes is about right.
Okay.
So we're going to cut to commercial break right now.
Will you play us out with the music stinger?
No?
Oh, me?
I thought you meant Jerry.
No, you.
Very nice.
Thank you.
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Then your girlfriend started wearing it, which was cute, until she dumped you and took it with her, which was not so cute.
Yeah, well, anyway, now you're on eBay.
And there it is, same tee from the same tour, still living in your memory, rent-free forever.
See, the things you love have a way of finding their way back to you.
But eBay isn't just for getting whatever your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend stole back, right?
No, it's also for that rare championship foul ball you caught then heroically gave to the kid next to you.
And where else are you going to find your first car, the one you wish you'd never sold, but now finally get the chance to take it back home?
For good this time.
So shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story. eBay.
Things people love.
Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about, your couch.
Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.
Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.
It's true.
We looked it up.
It's not good.
But Anabay changes that.
It's washable, like fully washable.
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Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.
So yeah, if you're going to sit on something every day, maybe don't make it a biohazard.
And here's the kicker.
It's not just practical, it's affordable.
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Okay, Chuck, so one of the things I definitely associate with MTV is Michael Jackson's thriller.
I was into Thriller.
I had the red Thriller jacket.
My mom made me a white sequined glove for my first communion as a gift.
I was super into Michael Jackson.
And I loved Thriller so much that my family bought the making of the Thriller video on VHS and my sister watched it essentially until it broke.
Yeah.
So I always associate MTV with Thriller.
Anytime I knew it was coming on, I would go watch it.
It was awesome.
But it turns out like Michael Jackson and his record label had to basically fight to get on to MTV, which is mind boggling to me these days.
Yeah, for sure.
This was 1982 when the landmark album came out.
There's a very funny Vincent Price story because Vincent Price, obviously the legendary spooky actor, was in the 13-minute mini-movie that accompanied Thriller as the video.
And Vincent Price had an option, apparently to either take a flat fee of like I don't even know how much it was, 20 grand or something.
That's what I was going to say.
Or get.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Or get points on the Thriller album.
And he clearly opted for the for the flat fee.
Oh, wow.
And would go on to regret that for many years.
And apparently over the years called Michael Jackson a lot trying to sort of get back that deal which his calls were never returned.
And I will just let the listener know.
Look up the quote.
Apparently that came out about Vincent Price when Michael Jackson settled with his alleged victims many years later.
I'm not going to say it here, but you can go look it up if you want.
Okay.
One other thing about that album, too, that was interesting.
Billie Jean was on there.
No, Beat It was on there.
They both were.
But Eddie Van Halen played guitar on Beat It, that very famous guitar solo.
Oh, yeah.
And apparently at the time, Van Halen had like no outside work deal with one another.
All they could do is focus on Van Halen.
And so Eddie Van Halen had the opportunities.
Like yeah, I don't think anybody will hear this record.
I'm just going to play on this dude's record and no one will know about it because it will be uncredited.
And sure enough, it turns out that Beat It and Thriller became one of the biggest selling albums of all time.
Yeah.
I mean, well, people sort of like, how could Vincent Price have done that?
But Michael Jackson wasn't that level until after Thriller.
So I mean, Off the Wall was out, of course, and he was with the Jackson 5, but no one knew it was going to be, you know, one of the best selling, if not the best selling, albums of all time.
Man, poor Vincent Price.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, and also in regards to Thriller, it was a 900000 budget for that video directed by John Landis.
And part of the funding came from Josh's parents because they ended up selling you know, the making of on VHS, like you mentioned, 100000 copies of that in advance.
For $29.95, Showtime paid $300,000 to see the documentary.
Or I'm sorry, just to air the documentary.
And MTV paid another quarter of a million dollars for The Ultimate Right.
That's just the documentary.
Yeah, yeah.
Because the videos were free.
Yeah, for the making of Thriller, the documentary.
And it was good.
It was like an hour and 10 minutes long.
I looked it up.
Oh, yeah.
I watched it.
So one of the reasons why Thriller was a big deal is because there weren't a lot of black performers or artists on MTV at the time, so much so that David Bowie very famously called MTV out in an interview on MTV with Mark Goodman.
And he basically just said, like, what's the deal here?
I think his actually quote is, what the holy heck is going on with you guys?
Yeah.
And it was it was true.
I mean, like you just couldn't put it any other way.
And MTV basically said well, we play rock and it's actually rock's fault, because they're the ones who exclude black acts by calling them RB and not rock.
So blame them.
Blame the music industry, not us.
And that didn't fly.
That wasn't good enough.
And there's a guy who's, if there's a hero in this story, it's him.
His name is Walter Yetnikoff.
I think he was the head of CBS Records at the time.
And he said if you don't start playing these singles, these videos off of Michael Jackson's Thriller album, we're pulling all of CBS Records artists.
You're not going to get a single video from any of them.
And that was significant because they made up about a quarter of the videos that were playing on MTV at the time.
Yeah.
And part two of that.
And this is for real.
He he said, we will publicly accuse you of racism if you don't start playing these.
Yeah.
So I think that really hit home, obviously.
They got Billie Jean and beat it in the rotation fairly heavily at first.
But Libya said she found that that didn't last too long.
I feel like I remember seeing those ad nauseum forever.
Oh, really?
I remember not seeing them as often as I wanted.
Oh, well, you also had a sequin white glove on.
You might have wanted to hear more than me.
I don't know.
Yeah, that's true.
I love those songs, though.
And I remember working a commercial job one time with my longtime production manager Andrea, and she very casually dropped that she was a production coordinator on the Beat It video one time.
And I was like, excuse me?
One of the fun things about doing that stuff in LA is you would always meet people that just worked on these legendary jobs every now and then.
It's like, yeah, yeah, I was the lighting guy for whatever, for Thriller.
That's cool.
Yeah.
So by this time we're talking mid-'80s and MTV is now the place that is making the names of the artists who are making videos for their music, right?
Yeah.
And the more daring you were, or the more Kip Winger-esque you were, you could make a really big name for yourself.
It didn't matter all that much whether your music was particularly good.
Sometimes it didn't matter whether your video was even particularly good.
If you could get onto MTV and nail it in just the right way, they would play it a lot and you would sell a lot of records and your career would be made.
And it's no overstatement to say that Madonna's career was made.
Who else, Chuck?
Well, I mean people that already had good careers were launched into the stratosphere, like people like Billy Joel, who was already a prominent artist.
All of a sudden, he's putting out some of the buzz bin, like groundbreaking videos, like Pressure.
And then when he married or was dating, at least, Christy Brinkley.
Oh, yeah, I remember that video.
And like the video for Uptown Girl.
And all of a sudden, the biggest supermodel on planet Earth was on MTV.
It was a big deal.
They started the top 20 video countdown in 1984.
So all of a sudden that is rivaling American top 40 on radio, as far as like where the kids are going to see the top content.
The VMAs, the Video Music Awards, started also in 1984 and had plenty of iconic moments.
And very quickly, like...
Music video directors.
It became sort of a farm league for people that would go on to be huge.
Huge movie directors started out in music videos.
Or it went the other way, too.
I saw that William Friedkin, who directed The Exorcist in 1983, also directed Laura Branigan's video for Self-Control in 1983.
Yeah.
You know the one where she lives among the creatures of the night?
Uh-huh.
She doesn't have the will to try and fight.
I remember that.
I love Laura Branigan.
That's a great song.
It beats the heck out of Gloria, if you ask me.
I like Gloria.
I mean, I guess you don't have to choose, but I still like Self Control more.
But yeah, William Friedkin of The Exorcist directed that video.
That's true.
But far more often, to be fair, it went the other way.
And people started out in music videos and went on to be very popular film directors.
David Fincher directed Vogue for Madonna, The End of Innocence from Don Henley.
Janie's got a gun from Aerosmith, not the Aerosmith videos that featured Liv Tyler and Alicia Silverstone that were also iconic.
He also directed the George Michael Freedom 90 video, which talk about supermodels.
Like every supermodel under the sun was in that one.
I was reading about George Michael's I Want Your Sex video and I was like I guarantee that was as controversial as anything was when it came out.
And so I went on to our beloved newspapers.com and looked for some contemporaneous articles on that.
And, dude, the stuff that they were saying, like, should videos, should sexy videos be banned?
There are limits to artists' rights, and all this just junk censorship, junk that today is like.
And it absolutely was.
And if you go back and look at the video, it is objectively sexy.
But to ban anything because of this video, it's just mind-bogglingly stupid today in 2025.
Yeah, for sure.
Another group of directors, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, got their starts.
If you want to talk about just sort of groundbreaking videos, Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer in 1986.
Yes.
It was directed by Stephen R. Johnson.
The amazing stop-motion animation with the help of the brothers Quay and Aardman Animations.
That was a big one.
And then, of course, the AHA Take On Me video was a huge, huge breakthrough video.
Man, such a great song still.
Yeah.
Like the kind of song you can listen to on repeat still.
I mean, think about how many times you've heard Take On Me.
I love the song.
It's a really great song still, but yes, that video is amazing.
And plus I mean it didn't hurt that the lead singer was about as dreamy as a person on MTV could be.
Yeah, they're all hot dudes.
Yeah, I remember my sister with her hands clasped under her chin, just like staring at the TV whenever that guy came on.
We should mention just for Livia too, because Livia wrote this and she clearly has a soft spot in her heart for Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart video.
Yeah, she pointed out that there is a literal version that they sing like they change the lyrics based on what's going on in the video.
It's pretty hilarious.
There's some other ones too, that definitely made MTV because, as we talked about in Saturday Morning Cartoons, MTV provided a bardic function for American teenagers and eventually, teenagers around the world.
Like when you went and watched the top 20 countdown, you were seeing as all of your friends were seeing at the same time.
What was cool that week right?
Yeah.
Or you talked about, like, have you seen the ZZ Top video?
Like ZZ Top, had a trio of videos called the Eliminator Series for legs, sharp dress man, give me all your lovin'.
And it featured, like, that super cool, like, 1930s... car or whatever with the ZZ Top key chain.
And their guitar and their bass would spin on the axis.
They could just twirl them.
You remember that?
And they were fuzzy.
They were just really cool videos.
And I remember just being like, wow, I like these videos a lot because they were super sexy.
But I recently read how like essentially a feminist defense of those videos.
And they pointed out that the people who were the villains were people who were like sexually harassing the three women in the Eliminator series.
And they would always get their comeuppance.
And ZZ Top was always cheering for these three.
I guess muses or angels or whoever who would come out of the blue and save the day.
Yeah, angels and fishnet hosts.
Exactly.
I don't know if there was ever a group that was less likely to be MTV stars than ZZ Top was.
They were saying that there was a quote where they were like you know, we had basically had our run in rock, not even rock and roll.
Texas blues band.
Exactly.
I think this is in like Texas Monthly maybe magazine because, yeah, they're from Texas.
And then, all of a sudden, because of these videos, because of MTV, they had a brand new career.
And I think Billy Gibbons was the one who was quoted, who said like we got 16-year-old girls back as fans.
You know?
Like, so, yeah, that's a really great point.
They were extremely unlikely, and that demonstrates the power of what MTV could do.
If you made a cool video people talked about, you could have a brand new career on your hands.
I know you want to shout out Weird Al somebody that I've never been that into, but I was an MTV kid.
So I definitely saw and generally had a laugh with a lot of those videos.
They were great.
He apparently had 10 specials on MTV over the years called Al TV.
But yeah, that was another one, too.
Like you'd be like, have you seen Weird Al's Like a Surgeon video or I Lost on Jeopardy?
Yeah.
And then one other one too, that was a really big video early on was the video for Fish Heads from Barnes and Barnes.
You remember that?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't remember that being a very big song or video at all.
I thought it was just noteworthy because it was Bill Paxton.
Or was that a big song?
I think it was one of those ones that made people go watch MTV because it would come on sometimes.
Okay.
I don't think it was like a huge hit or anything like that, but it was one of those early videos that drew you to MTV by word of mouth.
Yeah.
Kind of like MC Scat Cat.
That's right.
Paula Abdul.
Yep.
I remember that.
Wait, wait.
We're getting nostalgic.
We failed.
We failed.
I know, I know.
That failed a long time ago.
But we do have to mention the Hungry Like the Wolf video from Duran Duran.
Because that was, it certainly wasn't the first, but that was maybe the best example of music video as like a very cinematic, you know, where all of a sudden it was like the band was in a movie.
And it was like it's not like they weren't a big band before, but Hungry Like the Wolf, really put them over the top.
Yeah, for sure.
And just changed the way that people made videos, too.
They made them much more, like it was a movie.
Yeah, a pretty good one, I thought.
Yeah, and a good song, too.
Should we take our second break here at Minute 47?
Yeah.
All right, we'll be right back because there's plenty more to talk about with MTV.
On eBay, every find has a story.
Like if you're looking for a vintage band tee, not just a tee, the band tee from the last show your favorite band ever played.
You wore it everywhere.
Then your girlfriend started wearing it, which was cute, until she dumped you and took it with her, which was not so cute.
Yeah, well, anyway, now you're on eBay.
And there it is, same tee from the same tour, still living in your memory, rent-free forever.
See, the things you love have a way of finding their way back to you.
But eBay isn't just for getting whatever your ex-boyfriend or girlfriend stole back, right?
No, it's also for that rare championship foul ball you caught then heroically gave to the kid next to you.
And where else are you going to find your first car?
The one you wish you'd never sold.
But now, finally get the chance to take it back home.
For good this time.
So shop eBay for millions of finds, each with a story. eBay.
Things people love.
Let's talk about something you probably haven't thought about, your couch.
Yeah, that thing you nap on, eat on, cry on.
Turns out that most sofas are basically bacteria playgrounds.
It's true.
We looked it up.
It's not good.
But Anabay changes that.
It's washable, like fully washable.
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Also, it's actually affordable, which is surprisingly rare.
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And here's the kicker.
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So MTV was a pretty big success in the mid-'80s, obviously so much so that Turner Broadcasting TBS tried to compete with their cable music channel.
I think the country music, I'm sorry, the cable music channel, CMC, started around the same time.
There were a lot of imitators.
Most of them fizzled out.
I think the Turner one was bought out by MTV for about a million bucks.
But in 1985 Viacom Inc bought MTV from Warner And leadership said hey, why don't we stop just playing random videos and start sort of bucketing this stuff?
And all of a sudden they had thematic shows like 120 Minutes and Headbangers Ball and Yo MTV Raps and stuff like that.
Yeah.
Yes.
120 minutes always has a soft spot in my heart because you had to stay up on Sunday night.
It started Sunday night at midnight.
So technically it started Monday morning at midnight and ran for 120 minutes till 2 a.m.
It's like the worst time slot in the history of time slots.
And yet that was the only place you could see, like a Susie and the Banshees video, or like Jesus and Mary chain, or whoever.
Yeah.
Like, that's the only place you could see those videos, and it was worth staying up for.
Yeah, the great Matt Pinfield.
Shout out to him as host.
Club MTV in 1987 with downtown Julie Brown.
That was their dance show, their sort of soul-trained American bandstand-style show.
I'd say just go listen to the heavy metal episodes if you want to hear more about Headbangers Ball.
Sure.
Uh, but yo MTV rap started in 1988 and that was um like run DMC had been on, I think, in 84 with rock box.
But yo MTV raps cannot be under or overestimated, I guess, as was what a role it played in bringing um hip hop and rap to the mainstream.
Yeah, and if you want a new trivia question to replace the Buggles video, Kill the Radio Star.
The first rap video played on Yo on TV Raps was Shinehead's Chain Gang.
Oh, okay.
You remember that one?
I don't.
Not at all, actually.
Do you?
You know, the sound of the men working on the Chain Gang?
Yeah, I know that song.
He did like a hip-hop version of that.
Oh, okay.
It's good.
Go listen to it.
Yeah.
They were also famous for banning some of these.
And again, you're going to get more attention by doing something like that.
So N.W.A. had some of their stuff banned.
Public Enemy, the great song by the time I get to Arizona, was banned in 1991.
And then also one of my favorite shows was Unplugged.
Oh, yeah.
Started in 1989 where they had bands in studio live in concert doing acoustic numbers of their hits.
And some of the Unplugged albums became just sort of iconic, legendary vinyl LPs for those bands, just because people had never heard them that way before, like Nirvana and Oasis and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I was like, I didn't really ever watch MTV Unplugged.
I wasn't very aware of it.
Now that you said that Nirvana song.
Yes, I remember now.
Yeah, R.E.M.'
's was awesome.
And, you know, they had some sort of obvious unplugged stuff like Bob Dylan and Neil Young.
But I think it was when the rock bands did.
It is when it got the most attention and was maybe at its best.
For sure.
Or Depeche Mode.
So one other thing that was huge, just huge, that started out as just some small thing that they tried, was in 1986 Alan Hunter took everybody to Daytona Beach.
And they basically just covered spring break.
And spring break became an annual event on MTV for decades to come.
It was just a huge deal.
Every spring break was covered and it was just people like doing shots or dancing or whatever, like on the beach playing volleyball.
It was just all lame and dumb, but it was exactly the kind of thing you wanted to see if it was like April in northern Ohio.
Because it didn't look like that outside in April in northern Ohio.
So like it just brought you down to the beach with all these beautiful people.
And it was it was a great experience for sure.
And that also kind of gave birth to Beach MTV or MTV Beach House later on, which they would basically just rent a beach house and broadcast from there for the summer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It just made summer, summer.
You know what I'm saying?
Sort of like the official kickoff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or like, even like in the middle of summer, just seeing that in the morning, you know, getting ready to go hang out with friends because school was out.
It just it was like a punctuation mark for summer.
It just made it more of a summer to me.
Yeah, for sure.
I totally agree.
MTV News was another non-music show.
That's kind of where we're headed in this segment.
And it was a very big deal.
I remember that they had a very iconic intro to, with the typewriter spelling out MTV News and that sound that it made.
Yeah.
Do that louder.
You just did it great.
Well, your first try was better.
Kurt Loder, though, was a veteran rock journalist and he was sort of the main face in 1987.
But, you know, they also had like Chris Connolly.
He ended up being the movie guy.
He was the MTV News guy for a while.
I had many, many crushes via MTV News, like Tabitha Soren and Serena Altschul, and even a little bit of Kennedy.
Yeah, Kennedy.
Remember Duffy?
Oh, I remember Duffy.
She lived in a friend of mine's building in New York in the Greenwich Village in the mid-90s and I saw her in the elevator once and almost passed out.
I'll bet.
I think the one who could top them all, though, was Daisy Fuentes.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
I forgot about her.
Daisy Fuentes.
Daisy Fuentes.
So anyway, moving on, there was a game show on MTV for, I think, just like a year, maybe called Remote Control.
It came on in 1987.
And if anyone asks you what MTV's first regular non-music programming was, it was Remote Control.
And I loved Remote Control.
Me too.
It had to be more than a year because Ken Ober was the host, unless they'd just replaced the host mid-year, which I don't remember.
Because another crush, Kari Wuer, took over for Ken Ober at a certain point.
But Remote Control was very funny and a great game show for people our age.
And to me it was most noteworthy as launching the careers of Colin Quinn, who was the sidekick, and a young Adam Sandler and Dennis Leary got their start there.
Yeah, they were both writers.
And then Adam Sandler also played some early characters, one of which was Stud Boy.
Yeah.
But it was great.
It had one of the all-time best sets of not just any game show, but any TV show.
It was set in Ken Ober's parents' basement and it was all about.
All the questions were about TV and TV history and stuff.
It was really wonderful.
Like, the people, the players played from recliners.
And if I remember correctly, if you were... If you lost...
Like the recliner went sailing backwards through the wall?
I think so.
That was a great show.
Yeah, and it's funny.
I didn't watch any clips, but in my brain, it just popped into my head.
The intro was something like, I wasn't like the other kids or something like that, right?
Okay, it was Kenny wasn't like the other kids.
Oh, that's it.
TV mattered, nothing else did.
Nothing else did.
Girl said yes, but he said no.
Now he's got his own game show.
Do you remember that or did you look that up?
I remembered it.
I did not look up a word of that.
That's so funny, man.
I knew there was something there about not being like the other kids.
No, because yeah, he just wanted to watch TV.
So now he has a game show about TV.
Uh, house of style, 1989 fashion show hosted by Cindy Crawford was huge.
Uh, as far as comedy goes, it turns out beyond remote control being very funny.
Um uh, they launched like they were.
They were sneakily, one of the great comedy incubators of the eighties.
I feel like.
Yeah.
And nineties.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Into the 90s because the state, the great to me, the best sketch show of all time was the state.
Oh, yeah.
From 94 to 95 on MTV.
The Ben Stiller show in 1990 was amazing and very underseen and underrated.
Did you watch that when it was on?
Oh, yeah.
I did not.
Yeah, I was into all of that.
So that launched Janine Garofalo, Bob Odenkirk, David Cross, Judd Apatow, Andy Dick, for better or worse.
Ben Stiller, obviously, because before that, he was just Jerry Stiller's kid.
And this was where he introduced himself to the world.
And we have severance thanks to the show.
So thanks a lot, MTV.
But it also brought together Bob Odenkirk and David Cross.
Yeah. with Dinos Dimantopoulos, who was also a writer on the show with them.
And they went on to make Mr. Show.
Now, that actually might be my favorite sketch show.
I think so, too.
But I went back, so I was like, I haven't seen a second of this show.
And I found a great sketch with Bob Odenkirk as Charles Manson.
Yeah, yeah.
But Charles Manson is Lassie.
It's like a black and white parody of Lassie, but rather than Lassie the dog, it's Charles Manson who's like the family dog.
But he's just saying crazy stuff.
And Bob Odenkirk does a perfect Charles Manson.
It's so good.
And that's where Ben Stiller started doing the Tom Cruise impressions.
Yeah, such a good show.
Even though I wasn't into it, we have to talk about Totally Pauly.
Sure.
Pauly's show ran for five years, so it was actually a pretty big hit.
The Wheeze.
Yeah, the Wheeze.
And then one of my favorites, which got you know MTV had such good programming for a while there with these other shows.
Liquid Television in 1991.
10 years at least, before Adult Swim came on, you could be a kid that was watching this crazy, weird experimental animation on television.
Yeah.
Liquid television, right?
Did you watch And Flux?
I loved Aeon Flux.
It was mind blowing.
Yeah.
If you've never seen Aeon Flux, this is like a decade before Adult Swim came out.
And this was not a time like there weren't such a thing as cartoons for adults.
You had to basically watch heavy metal over and over again.
Yeah.
Maybe Akira or something like that.
This was like a cavalcade, a showcase of adult, weird, bizarre, hilarious cartoons.
And it's actually where Beavis and Butthead got its start.
Therefore, where Mike Judge got his start.
Aon Flux was super cool.
And, in addition to just kind of launching some careers, it just laid the groundwork and showed that there's a huge appetite for people who are no longer in high school, who really love pot, maybe acid a little bit and watch TV, or willing to stay up late to watch cartoons.
This showed that they were out there.
Yeah, I didn't know until today that the animated show Daria was a spinoff of Beavis and Butthead, that Daria was a character briefly on that show until you pointed that out.
Yeah, she was one of their classmates at high school.
Yeah.
So Daria was big.
We can't you know, we're running so long we can't like dive into all of these.
But we have to at least mention shows like Jackass and Cribs.
Yeah.
And then and then, the birth of reality TV eventually was stuff like The Osbournes and Jersey Shore and Punk'd.
But it all got started in 1992 with The Real World.
Which, I mean, clearly, I mean, you know, there was the 70s PBS show, An American Family.
But as far as the teenagers watching stuff reality TV I feel like was birthed with the real world.
Yeah.
And you can make a case.
My hypothesis is that you can trace pretty much every problem that we have with the world today back to reality TV and ergo back to the real world.
Yeah.
That show was really good for a while.
I will stand, I stand behind the real world.
I don't remember what season.
I feel like it really jumped the shark, but I know that there are a lot of people that say it was the year that they somebody got in the shower with somebody else and it became really just sort of like people were getting on there just because they knew they could be famous.
But I feel like it had a more pure intent before that as a kind of a weird social experiment.
Yeah, no, it wasn't the show itself that was problematic.
It was the foundation that it created, the legacy it created.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that.
I mean, if you like reality TV, great, good on you.
I'm glad that it's out there for you, but it wrecked TV until... the streamers came along.
Like if you liked a written scripted show TS for you, because everyone went all in on reality for years and years and years.
You had to basically get a subscription to HBO to watch like a decent TV show for a long time because reality TV got so popular and it was so cheap to make.
Yeah, for sure.
I don't want people to get mad if we don't mention Carson Daly and TRL.
This was in the sort of days where I was fading out of MTV.
So I wasn't as into it.
But Carson Daly did a fine job on Total Request Live.
And I'm also a big fan of the great Dave Holmes, who's a really good dude in real life and does some great things these days.
Was he on Total Request Live?
Yeah.
I don't know if he took over for Carson Daly, or sort of pinch hit or sometimes, but I know he was definitely one of the hosts.
So a lot of people are like, what's this MTV you're talking about?
And there's a good reason for that.
And the reason why is because MTV just started to die, a thousand deaths by new channels and networks coming on.
You're you like you have no control whatsoever on what's gonna come up next and I remember doing this quite clearly You'd be watching a perfectly good winger video and then all of a sudden comes.
I don't know some terrible video I'm not gonna call it anybody's favorite artist and you would just immediately turn the channel because you knew you could turn back in three minutes and see what else was next.
And And they just got bled by that.
And they found that half hour shows kept you in longer.
And if those shows weren't made up of music videos but an actual narrative over the course of a half an hour?
They lost less and less viewers.
And so it just became sensible for them to get away from music.
But fear not, because they said, if you still want music videos, don't worry.
We will have you covered for the rest of your life with MTV2.
That's right.
MTV2 launched in 1996.
It was like, hey, it's just going to be music videos.
We pinky swear.
Trust us.
Less than 10 years later, it was mostly reality shows and not music videos.
YouTube really sealed the fate, because you could just watch any music video ever by just typing it in your search bar on YouTube.
Like Garmin style?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And yeah, I mean, I watch music videos.
There's still a show.
I can't remember what it's called that I see on Hulu that just runs music videos.
So I'll put that on sometimes if I'm like folding laundry.
Hmm.
Okay.
For nostalgia.
It's kind of nice.
If you go on MTV, it's still around.
I believe MTV2 is still around, too.
There is a 98.75% chance that you will find an episode of Ridiculousness playing.
Yeah.
It carries MTV almost single-handedly.
It's a show where they just basically put together hilarious clips.
It's like...
It's like America's Funniest Home Videos for nihilists and skateboarders, basically, right?
Yeah.
And it's a good little show.
You remember our friend Hampton Yount, who was in one of our variety shows in L.A.?
That's the only reason I know about Ridiculousness.
Yep, he was one of the writers on Ridiculousness.
It's a cute little show, but it has propped up MTV so much that it's been on for 14 years, since 2011, yet somehow it is in season 45.
Wow.
That's how many episodes they crank out to keep MTV going.
So hats off to Rob Drydeck.
It's the house hunters of MTV.
Yeah, essentially, for sure.
Well, before we leave, I do want to quickly kind of mention the MTV contests.
If you were a kid in the 80s, they had these crazy, crazy contests that you could enter.
And they always seemed to kind of want to one up the last as far as what they would do.
And they were I mean, it was like, you know, you can win Bon Jovi's childhood home.
You can win a pink house from John Mellencamp or John Cougar at the time in his small town or whatever.
Uh, but they were, they were crazy.
Um, there was one very famous story of the van, like party with Van Halen for two days.
And this was in 1984.
And this, this I was about to say poor guy, it's probably the best thing that ever happened to him.
They weren't like Hey, let's just kind of get this kid in here and whatever, sign something like they partied with them.
They got him drunk and gave him cocaine and, uh, got a groupie to have sex with him in a bathroom.
And, like, he did the whole rock star thing.
Van Halen was very intent.
Like, apparently he woke up on day two and was like, I can't, I've got to go home.
And Alex Van Halen was, like, shoving a beer in his face and was like, you've got to do this, dude.
He said, you can't leave this spot until you drink that beer.
And it was a tall boy.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was going to say, after you rattled all that off, that that was just day one.
Yeah, that was day one.
There was a day two.
And this was a sponsored contest by MTV.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, there's no way you could do that stuff these days, obviously.
But they had a bunch of those, like, you know, Party with the Band.
I know that the police had a sort of a disaster of a contest where they were supposed to fly on their private jet with the band.
And I think that went all pear-shaped.
I remember very clearly Madonna had a contest that you at home could make the video for True Blue.
And I just remember seeing like bad homemade video after bad homemade video of true blue over and over and over again, just so I could vote via phone.
Uh, yeah, the contest, those are a lot of fun.
There, there are a lot more kind of fun ones.
There's a kind of a cool page six article, uh, that covers some of the wackier contests they had.
Yeah, it's definitely worth reading.
Thanks for sending that to me.
Ooh, Chuck, you got anything else?
No, I mean, we missed a ton.
So it's just kind of one of those episodes.
We tried to stuff as much as we could in here.
Yep.
And keep an ear out for VH1, which should be following this one right after, right?
Yeah.
I say we skip listener mail even.
It's been so long.
And just say, go with God.
Go watch some music videos.
Yeah, everybody's tired.
Take the day off, everybody.
Yeah, exactly.
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