The MTV

File under Cage the Rage

Thirty years ago this week a fledgling television network debuted on the relatively new ‘cable’ television. At 12:01 a.m. on August 1st, 1981, as the channel went live, the world heard, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Rock and Roll.”

And MTV was born.

Source

Ok, when I say ‘the world’, I actually mean less than a million viewers in New Jersey, and that’s it. MTV began with less than auspicious viewership, but within a couple of years tens of millions of kids, including me, were saying to their parents “I want my MTV.”

Now certainly MTV had a big impact on society, whether good or bad (definitely a little of both). But that’s not what I find interesting. What I do find interesting is our reaction to the evolution of MTV over time and how that reaction is similar to other evolutions in our lives and work.

In those initial years MTV aired music videos, and served as a vehicle for this new art form, launching new stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson (sans the other 4 (good move by the way)). But somewhere in the mid to late 80’s the brass at the top of the network sensed a paradigm shift. They were no longer the window on the pop music scene, they were one of the drivers. They achieved any marketer’s dream – they became an ‘idea’ instead of just a product. With this realization MTV branched into new unchartered territories.

For those that grew up with the music videos, there was a slow but noticeable move away from the medium and into original programming. And for the Gen Xers who were there from the beginning, this was disturbing. This wasn’t their MTV anymore, it was some bastardized version, epitomized by my sister’s comment somewhere around 1994, “Remember when MTV actually played music?!” By that point there was Beavis and Butt-Head, MTV News, the game show Remote Control, and the coup-de-gras: The Real World. NOBODY realized just what that show would do to mass entertainment. It ushered in the death of the traditional sitcom and resulted in me caring about C-List celebrities’ ability to Tango, all in one fell swoop.

The transition did not go over well for many. We belly-ached about the awful programming and what MTV had ‘devolved’ into. As if the previous state of music video after music video, ad nauseum, was socially redeemable. If you look at the Millennials to follow us, they only knew what MTV had become. That was their reality and they owned it. As MTV continues to evolve they will long for the good old days when the network actually aired reality shows. Likewise the baby boomers before us dismissed the entire concept of the station because it didn’t fit their experiences.

That is a microcosm of what happens to us daily in work and our lives. Our reality changes and we no longer ‘own’ it. We long for the ways things used to be. And most destructively we label what’s new as ‘bad’. Change is not inherently good or bad. Change is change. Change is different. But most of all, change is inevitable. And to be emotionally tied to the previous state, to say that ‘then’ was ‘good’ and ‘now’ is ‘bad’ is wasteful, demoralizing to others around you, and a taxation on your emotional effort.

This isn’t a prompting to turn lemons into lemonade, or for you to go read “Who Moved My Cheese”, but it is a caution to not dismiss an idea, or a process, or The Jersey Shore, just because they’re different.

Because different does not equal bad.

Actually, you can dismiss The Jersey Shore.

Song of the Day
In honor of the first video ever played on MTV, the song of the day is The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star".