MTV is what, thirty two years old this August? And it’s turned into a punk.

I LOVED mtv. I would leave it on 24/7, as often as not. I never got tired of watching, even the lameass early MTV which had the Buggles, four or five lipsynched Stones videos, and some other shit stolen from one variety show or another. Oh, and John Cougar’s little ditty about jack & dianne, which would never have been heard outside of Indiana if not for MTV.

it wasn’t very long until, like goldfish, the talent expanded to fill the available space- really amazing videos started to come down the pike, like ZZ Top’s ‘Rough Boy’, Billy Gibbons mournful guitar licks making it a great song even before they filled the video with what for the time were amazing SFX and leggy broads, or pieces thereof. Tom Petty’s ‘Don’t come around here no more” was another that I enjoyed immensely. Much later in the game Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” was a video that was visually amusing and earwormy too. And Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of choice”- well, any video in which Chris Walken flies has my vote.

There are hundreds of them that I enjoyed, and for the most part, they are relegated to the backalleys of Youtube these days.

I worked for a design firm once whose principal told me he couldn’t watch MTV because the movie in his head was better than what they put on the screen. I understand that, because I’m that way about movies, sometimes, but the truth really is, watching some of the better videos on MTV was being able to see the song through someone else’s mind’s eye, to experience their imagination. I mean, I’ve seen flowers, but when Van Gough painted them, his imagination allowed me to see something else about flowers that I had never seen before.

I want my MTV. Don’t look like I’m gonna get it anytime soon. Amazing that in the span of 32 years you could create, saturate, and destroy an entire art form.