I cultivated many a guilty pleasure as a kid – spending my entire allowance on Skor bars; reading the naughty parts of The Thorn Birds; procuring a bottle of neon pink nailpolish, stealing through the underbrush with my best friend to the tree fort built by two neighborhood boys that picked on us, and intending to write the words “WE ARE BIG DORKS” on the side with the nailpolish, but running out before we could finish so that our handiwork read “WE ARE BI,” which we decided would do in a pinch; and watching oodles of MTV. Mere moments after its 1981 debut, my parents outlawed MTV, refusing to provide anything resembling a rational explanation for this decision. Like most parental edicts justified only by an exasperated “because I said so,” the MTV ban had the predictable effect of creating in me and my little brother, where none had existed before, a desire to sit limp in front of MTV for hours. (Think about it. Would it ever have occurred to you to run with scissors before your mother specifically told you not to do so? No. After she put the idea in your head, did you entertain fantasies of grabbing that mean pair of shears out of the top kitchen drawer and taking off at a dead run, dashing outside in the cold with a wet head and untied shoelaces and daring your fate to find you as the Chariots Of Fire theme swelled in the orchestra pit of your head? Obviously.) The prohibition also added yet another item to an already lengthy list of forbidden activities which we used against each other as tattling leverage; the fact that we both engaged in these misbehaviors did not prevent either of us from ratting the other one out in order to settle sibling disputes. I would stroll nonchalantly past my mother to the fridge, pretend to browse for a snack while informing on my bro (“Hey, Ma. What’s for dinner? Is Dad home yet? Oh, David’s watching MTV again, by the way. Well, see you later.”), cock an ear for the offended howl of indignation from the TV room, and beat a hasty retreat before my own prosecutorial zeal came into question. My mother took an amazingly long time to get sick of this – at least, sick enough not to care what we rotted our brains with if we’d just give her some peace.

Until that joyous day arrived, though, we had to indulge with care, switching to different channels – and feigning credible interest in their programming – at the first creak of a parental footstep. When I flip past MTV these days, I wonder why we even bothered, before I remember that MTV in its current incarnation bears little or no resemblance to the MTV of my youth. I can’t imagine that kids in 1999, faced with the Real World XXIII: Ho Chi Minh City chunder that constitutes today’s MTV programming, have the same relationship with MTV that my friends and I used to. Just a reminder: MTV used to air actual videos. Not programs edited in the style of videos, not ads starring characters from programs edited in the style of videos – VIDEOS. Not only that, but MTV used to air videos 24 HOURS A DAY. MTV used to air NOTHING BUT videos. MTV did not have programs AT ALL, except in the sense of a VJ having a “show” just as a radio DJ would. MTV invented radio that we could watch. And we watched. We all watched. We watched before school. We watched after school. We watched late at night. We watched during the commercial breaks of other channels. We watched over the phone, not really talking except to say “ew” or “I kind of don’t hate this song that much” or “hey, it’s your boyfriend, ha ha ha” when David Coverdale or Colin Hay materialized. We watched at home. We watched at friends’ houses. Sociologists and guidance counselors and pop culties moaned and clutched their foreheads and said things like “audio wallpaper” and “short attention span” and “generational affect” and “death of FM radio,” and we all sort of said “uh-huh” and didn’t take our eyes off the screen.

Grown-ups liked to whine about MTV suppressing our imaginations, but MTV didn’t do that (except to suck up time we could have better spent reading – not a solid argument against the channel per se, and probably not the real reason so many adults reacted negatively to it). MTV gave a part of our imaginations a name. Since the beginning of time, kids have made up stories to go with pop music – characters to match the lyrics, personal fantasies that the music figures in, and so on. MTV gave us a name for those stories: videos. I don’t think any of us saw a video for a given song and thought it represented a correct or definitive interpretation of the song – I mean, Duran Duran videos didn’t represent much of anything, except perhaps the adroit use of body paint – but we still took an interest in what the band thought the song should “look like.” We didn’t come at it from an ironic or po-mo standpoint, and we didn’t sense that it had altered the culture in any significant way; it didn’t appeal to us on an intellectual level. We liked music, and we liked television, and before long we forgot either medium before MTV, but we blew off the “MTV generation” kerfuffle as just so much boy-these-kids-today yapping.

Ten or fifteen years later, of course, those of us who belong to it realize that the MTV generation does in fact exist. We knew TV before MTV, but we also knew MTV before Kurt “My Former Career As A Serious Journalist Prevents Me From Smiling, Ever, At Anything” Loder and Singled Out and Unplugged, when Colin Quinn starred in Remote Control and MTV played World Premiere Videos and Headbanger’s Ball faced off against the late movie and the promo with the guy making the sandwich with M-shaped bread and a TV-shaped squirt of mustard ran every ten minutes. MTV used to air Yo! MTV Raps in primetime. MTV used to hire VJs who knew a little about music. MTV used to poke as much fun at spring break as we do at them now for covering it. MTV used to have, well, videos. But the “MTV generation” label has less to do with when we watched MTV than it does with how, and how much. Today, we tend to take for granted MTV’s rise to power, but the channel became a dominant and nearly omnipresent cultural force almost immediately, and it exerted a significant influence on the way we consumed both music and television. But the MTV generation did not examine MTV, or itself, except to pronounce Billy Idol’s excessive sweatiness in “Dancing With Myself” “gross” or to note that Belinda Carlisle had “porked out” since the Go-Gos’ last single. Whether MTV, or its programming, sucked didn’t matter. MTV was just . . . there. MTV just . . . was.

Eventually, though, MTV began to wield its power consciously. The executives saw what they had wrought, and figured they could wreak the same thing if they chopped up the demo, and this thinking begat the accursed programming blocks. MTV eased us into it with a film program here and a game show there, introducing MTV News and Alternative Nation (amazing how tired that name sounds now, eh what?) and other chunks of dedicated time that slowly but surely ate up the air time devoted to videos. Once MTV knew its own strength, it brought that strength to bear with embarrassingly obvious market- segment pandering, and although this approach yielded a few wildly successful results (Beavis and Butthead, the Real World-Road Rules double dip) as well as interesting experiments like The State, the station had moved away from its original mission. Every programming decision of the last year or two points to a fundamental misunderstanding of or disregard for MTV’s origins: the ideas stolen from its sister station VH-1 (Biorhythm); the shows that have nothing, even tangentially, to do with music (Loveline, Celebrity Deathmatch); the increased focus away from competent professionals like Matt Pinfield and towards stupid, shameless coeds in string bikinis; the creation of M2, a feeble response to the repeated pastings MTV had taken in the entertainment press for not showing videos anymore. MTV defined “edgy” before that term became so utterly annoying, and now that the term has become annoying, MTV still defines it. Two words: Jesse. Camp.

In the ë80s, we all had MTV in common, even the kids who didn’t have cable. In a sense, it belonged to us. I don’t mean this in a “we used to stand when a lady entered the room” kind of way, but I hope teenagers don’t look at MTV now and think, “Cool.” I hope they don’t watch the programming and believe that it represents anything unique, because MTV slowly turned its back on the radio-we-could-watch principle, and after a brief TV-we-could-listen-to transition phase, it became just TV. I hope that kids who don’t remember Martha Quinn or any of the rest of them realize that MTV doesn’t deserve to keep the M, that as TV it gets stomped by VH-1 any day of the week, and that MTV so badly wants them to see MTV as the last word of youth culture that it has completely lost sight of what gave it the last word to begin with. I hope their parents don’t forbid them to watch MTV, because then they’ll watch MTV on the sly, and it represents more of a danger to young brain cells now than it ever did, because it sucks out loud.

Well, except for Dave Holmes, because I knew him from before he became a VJ, and he tells hilarious stories and knows a lot about music, so he doesn’t suck, but a pox on the rest of MTV.

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