CHRIS' QUARANTINE RECOMMENDATION OF THE DAY (5/8/20): MTV ON THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

CHRIS' QUARANTINE RECOMMENDATION OF THE DAY (5/8/20):

MTV ON THE INTERNET ARCHIVE

By Chris La Vigna (Chris_LaVigna)

Salute the flag you dorks! Alright, good, now let's go watch some Joan Jett videos...

Well to start off, I'm assuming you all know about a thing called Music Television, or MTV for short. It was this little channel that showed music videos, and it completely shook up the music industry and became one of the defining forces of popular culture in the 1980s. You might have also heard of the Internet Archive, a great public resource that stores countless documents, video files, and archived web sites from primitive eras of the world wide web. 

What do these two entities have in common? Not much, except for the fact that some brave, generous soul has been steadily uploading hours of vintage MTV broadcasts on the Internet Archive. Everything from vintage promos and annual "The Year In Rock" specials, to full tapings of daily broadcasts, complete with intros from various MTV VJs and all sorts of old advertisements (isn't it funny how we despise commercials until they're a few years old, then treat them like defanged time capsules?). If you're a music fan or just a 80s/90s pop culture junkie, this section of the archive is a veritable treasure trove.

THE SCREEN CAN'T HANDLE THE SHEER RADNESS OF IT ALL!

Now I know MTV has a mixed legacy. Even in their heyday, many artists were frustrated by how conservative the network was, frequently forcing them to edit controversial material from their videos, and in many cases outright refusing to air them. They were also infamously slow to the draw when it came to airing videos from black performers, something David Bowie famously called them out on during an interview back in 1983.

By the mid-to-late 2000s, the network pretty much stopped airing music videos altogether--largely due to declining album sales. So yeah, your days of downloading Eminem's discography on Kazaa are directly responsible for MTV betraying its roots. You feel good about yourself? Huh? You proud of what you did? That's what allowed them to focus more on the reality TV shows that they'd been getting strong ratings with since the 1990s, thus facilitating the (de)evolution from REAL WORLD and MTV CRIBS to JERSEY SHORE and RIDICULOUSNESS.

But at the end of the day, almost everybody has some aspect of MTV history to draw something positive from. Metal heads still talk about how awesome HEADBANGER'S BALL was. Fans of alt-comedy and weird animation love classic shows like LIQUID TELEVISION and BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD. People who came of age in the early 2000s still have fond memories of TRL, the last gasp of MTV's mission be the music tastemakers of America. The fact that people who weren't even alive when MTV played music videos still whine about MTV not playing music videos shows how much of a generational institution it became before the internet leveled its influence. Each generation wants their MTV. 

Okay, that felt like a nice, poignant sentence to end on. Watch some classic MTV footage and enjoy the weekend, you goons! Stay safe and stay strong. I'll see you all on Monday with a new Q-Rec, hot and fresh outta the oven!