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Present at the CreationReliving MTV's first moments on earth.

By Troy PattersonPosted Wednesday, Aug. 2, 2006, at 4:17 PM ET

As every pop-cultist, trivia geek, and hip person knows, the first music clip to air on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. Yesterday, on VH1 Classic's 24-hour replay of the mother ship's launch, MTV Day One (which repeats on Saturday at 9 a.m. EST), the video still slayed: An intro where the moon's reflection shimmers on a latex sea, a firm command of irony, the capable theft of Devo's aesthetic, the restrained deployment of both youth-revolt iconography and explosives. … It still looks like a Flash Gordon future.

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But what of the clips that immediately followed "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Have they aged well? Which now wear an aura of innovation? Do ya think Rod Stewart's sexy?

MTV's second video was "You Better Run," wherein Pat Benatar wears a black-and-white striped shirt of the sort that was quite fashionable the last time I went outside. Benatar, yet to create the epic "Love Is a Battlefield," carries herself as if she's wearing a pint of blush, which she is. The third video was Stewart's distinctly primitive "She Won't Dance." Stewart shakes his bottom like a naughty schoolboy and splays his legs when he leaps, the better to leapingly hump his guitarists. He accomplishes all this while wearing a jumpsuit the color of medical scrubs. The suit's asymmetrical neckline dares to venture down near Rod's right hipbone. It's all too plausible that some hipster in northern Brooklyn will slip into such an outfit this Saturday evening.

If you watched MTV on Aug. 1, 1981, you would have seen Stewart leaping and humping quite a bit. Perhaps the only artists in heavier rotation were the Who—whose operatic instincts led them to outclass their peers at the dawn of the video age—and a trio of arena rockers: REO Speedwagon, .38 Special, and Styx. It is somehow comforting to know that Stewart, a 35-year-old in girly pants, was MTV's first pretty boy.

MTV's fourth video, an excursion deeper into its art-school side, was Ph.D's "Little Susie's on the Up." Rigorously nonsensical, it features pigs in a butcher shop and poodles in tutus, and it looks like the work of a film-school student assigned to make a film that looks like a documentary on ballroom-dancing competitions directed by Luis Buñuel.

As demonstrated by Todd Rundgren in "Time Heals"—No. 6, just behind "Brass in Pocket," where Chrissie Hynde gives it a little Lily Tomlin when playing a diner waitress—you shouldn't go around talking about Modernist art just because you think you like it. Rundgren's crudely trippy clip, which inserts the singer into paintings by the likes of Magritte and Chirico, is a tribute to Surrealism made by someone with a brazenly superficial knowledge of it. (Meanwhile, one side effect of MTV's early embrace of absurdity and aggressive dream logic is that nobody pays any mind when a video that's maybe supposed to make sense is sloppy with narrative disjunctions.)

For the record, MTV's first bit of programming—the appetizer for the Buggles that stands as its real moment of self-definition—was a tremendous bit of found art, an approximate quarter-hour of documentary footage of the countdown to a space shuttle launch. Nothing happens until blast-off, when the shuttle film switches to footage of an Apollo rocket and an astronaut plants MTV's flag on the moon; it's just tape of mission control and the launch pad and the chase planes that's narrated in an engineer's nasal Midwestern drone. You will zone out, but you won't leave your seat: No one turns away from an exploding rocket.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray Editor:

It's refreshing to see that, even after 25 years, nothing brings out the inner-fogey quite like MTV. Our Fray runneth over with nostalgic tirades from cranks of every generation. Buried among the grouses, you'll even find some loving paeans to the MTV of yore. -GA

Remarks from the Fray:

Ahh, yes. I was there. In many ways my generation, having grown up with MTV, is defined by it even as we're changing it.

Back when MTV still showed music videos, say 20 years ago give-or-take, there were definitely various formulae in making a video.

The Story Then Sung About

This one's pretty straightforward and can be broken down into 2 categories.
1.) Lead singer (re)lives incidents of story then occasionally returns to the band to sing about it, and sometimes only after the story is complete does s/he reunite with the other dudes at the very end.
2.) The entire band (re)lives incidents of the story then [see above].

Singing the Song in Some Nether World or Other

Also pretty straightforward. The band performs the song but in, say, yellow jumpsuits in a giant factory that manufactures very tall, very beautiful nubile women. Or they perform in a whirling tunnel of tinfoil and Mylar. [see, of course, "I ran" by Flock of Seagulls]

The Non-Sense Semi-Story

Here the band plays the song, but in a variety of disjunctive settings, say, the bass player's in the shower while the lead singer's outside in the pool floating on a giant turtle. It's crucial to note that the song is being performed in real time the whole time.

The No Story with Song-Related Cut-Aways

Again, here the band plays the song, but occasionally there'll be cut-aways of what the lyrics are talking about. A perfect example of this would be The Waitresses' "I Know What Boys Like".

Straightforward Story

We never see the band, but we watch what amounts to a mini-movie with a plot. "Jack and Diane"?

Surreal Story with No Plot

Self-explanatory. A good example of this would be Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart".

Live

Rush, The Who, Phil Collins. Good times.

Skin

And lots of it. No plot, no band, no story, no fuss no muss. Just a lot of scantily clad ladies doing nothing in particular aside from giving each other baths and the like.

Remember NBC's shot across MTV's bow with Friday Night Videos, hosted by the young cultural icons of the day (i.e., various stars from NBC shows, e.g., Justine Bateman, Moon Unit Zappa, et al)? Didn't think so.

Anyway, on some level it's comforting to know that in 25 years of music videos, about the only that's changed in the formulae is the production value. My generation is nothing if not consistent in its apathy and ennui. You're welcome.

--switters

(To reply, click here.)

MTV was a can't miss winner. Music and the faces behind it. That was an appealing product although for my money, the only videos I ever enjoyed were concert footage or appearances of the band on Ed Sullivan, etc. Other than that, the videos became a terrible distraction. […]

The worst thing about MTV for me, by far, is their sickening way of editing these videos. A half a second of that face, a fourth of a second of that girl, a nano second of that body or image, it is absolutely frustrating beyond words. It is torture to try to watch or enjoy.

--JV-12

(To reply, click here.)

The original format was extremely good and MTV was groundbreaking at its early height. But I believe what happened was they began to experiment with concepts to increase their revenues and in the process lost touch with why people originally watched it. The reality shows, the obscure animated series, the stupid MTV beach parties, and then their unholy infatuation with hip-hop culture. […]

Its programming concentrated more and more on things unrelated to music and more on partying. Yo MTV Raps turned into a sick parody of itself with all those worthless newcomers to the rap and hip-hop dance scene. It tail-spun and so far hasn't recovered. To bad, but it's unlikely I'll go back to it, after all even if it did improve it wouldn't be something I could associate with - I'm just too old.

--Eigenvector

(To reply, click here.)

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