To Live and Defy in LA by Felicia Angeja Viator

Author:Felicia Angeja Viator
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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To be sure, television had long played a role in music promotion. In the 1950s, for instance, the advent of television variety shows hosted by the likes of Steve Allen and Ed Sullivan, and of course the American Bandstand program that would make Dick Clark such a force, gave recording artists the chance to seduce a national audience larger than any they could ever assemble on the concert circuit. Radio still reached more people, but television recalibrated listeners’ relationships with musicians, magnifying the importance of the artist’s visual image. Moreover, early television music programming taught record labels to privilege rather than merely patronize teenage consumers, who made up more and more of television’s viewership with each decade. In the 1970s, popular syndicated dance shows like Solid Gold and Don Cornelius’s Soul Train proved to television broadcasters and record companies just how fruitful, and lucrative, a cross-media partnership centered on a young demographic could be.40

The launch of MTV in the early 1980s complicated that alliance. Initially, it seemed a foolish idea for any television producer to forego road-tested variety and dance-show formats in order to screen prerecorded videos. That was especially true because virtually all videos first available were press-kit fodder—shorts created by labels at low cost to push new recording artists. Before the 1980s, music videos were cheaply made promotional videotapes, which might only play on loop during in-store appearances or be used for international publicity. Directors, artists, and talent managers considered them a “curiosity” at best and “lavatory paper” at worst.41 The architects of MTV, however, envisioned a near future in which the videos would get better—and a fortune to be made by stitching them together just as radio DJs did with records. The young staffers on the MTV payroll, many coming straight from FM and college radio programming, saw no reason not to create a parallel to the radio market using these otherwise disposable short films. As founding executive John Lack recalled, “A video radio station—that was my dream.”42

Rather than replicate the one-size-fits-all approach they saw inhibiting the producers of even the most daring, late-night network shows like Saturday Night Live and The Midnight Special, MTV’s founders refused to design a channel “to please everybody.” In 1981, in the midst of a national recession and a music industry slump, John Sykes, a founding member of the MTV team serving as promotion director, told a room full of skeptical record-label executives that the old broadcast networks had failed them. “We live in a very fragmented society which just won’t support a mass appeal, network-style format anymore,” he argued, touting MTV’s “target audience” concept. MTV took its inspiration from the world of radio, in which a given station pegged its format to a particular music style and carved out a listening audience with specific demographics, whether based on age, race, region, gender, or class.43 When it premiered in 1981, MTV was simply a visual iteration of FM radio in which a three- to five-minute film set to a

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