On August 5, 2006, the cable channel "VH1 Classic" celebrated MTV's 25th anniversary by running their original first-day music video schedule in its entirety. Lacking access to the channel, I begged Polas to tape six hours of the event for me and send the video over. This he did, and it's because of that gracious act that this page exists. So thank Polas by E-mailing him and yelling at him to update his site.
But before we begin another Classic MTV page, a confession: I'm kind of new at this. The facts are, I grew up in a house owned by parents who only liked two kinds of music: soft rock and Christian soft rock. Anything else was barely heard at all. It's only now that I'm discovering the existence of bands everybody else has heard of since the 1970's, and it's only within the past three years that I've had the chance to experience all areas of music and decide what I do and don't care to hear.
So far, the results are as follows:
#1: I like anything that has a good strong beat
in it. Oppositely, I can't stand anything slow.
#2: I don't like disco.
#3: Country is only tolerable in rare instances when the tune is
more about getting you to move and less about someone whining
their problems away.
#4: I don't like anything the African-American community seems to
like. Rap and hip-hop do nothing for me.
Do any of you see a problem here? I have the misfortune of entering the music world at a time when slow love songs and hip-hop are really popular for some reason, and strong-beat tunes seem to be viewed as a relic of the 80's. Slow, growly, awful bands like "Nickelback" are the kind of stuff I wanted to escape. How DARE you make it popular now!
An even worse experience has been my rediscovery of music videos. Now I can't get enough of them....and I can't get ANY of them. If I had a channel that played nothing but these glorious imaginative spectacles of light and sound, I'd be enraptured! Why did you let this art form die? WHY DID YOU???? WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?????
......okay, I'm calm now.....
Six hours turned out to be the right mark. MTV only had 86 videos in rotation on its first day, and the videos began repeating upon hour six.
Out of those 86, these are my top ten picks. Starting from the VERY beginning:
"Video Killed The Radio Star" contains the following things:
A crazy man in goggles who is also the lead male singer.
A woman in a glittery superhero outfit and plastic pink hair,
stuck in a tube.
Two identical girls with their hands glued tightly to their
thighs.
And a guy who can play two keyboards at once. Must be a savant!
I think the song is fine, but I gotta wonder--would it be famous at all if it hadn't been MTV's first video?
Brightly blonde and laden with moral turpitude, it's Debbie Harry here to confuse the bejabbers out of you. I have to ask those reading who were of record-buying age in the early 80's....you must know some secret I don't. Can you explain this song to me? Please?
"Rapture" contains the following things, among others:
A ballerina.
A man in a stiff Uncle Sam outfit balancing on one arm and
punching both his fists in the direction of stage left.
What appears to be Richard Pryor wearing an Indian headdress and
no shirt, slowly rising out of a bush at the end of the alley to
go "RARR!" at Debbie.
A woman walking like a robot into a wall, repeatedly, over and
over until the video ends. I feel sorry for the person who got
stuck with this part. She probably had grander dreams of stardom.
Someone walking a goat (this passes by so fast, you have to
wonder why they'd go through the trouble of getting one).
Aaaaand....the Man from Mars.
The prerecorded hosting veejay said that the Man from Mars went on to become a successful hip-hop artist, but didn't mention his name. The veejay also said Rapture was the first popular rap. Eh....I've admitted my musical knowledge is still in kindergarten, but I don't think that's accurate. Besides, how does this qualify as a "rap" at all? This isn't about street life or how much money you have, or how much money you steal, this appears to be about an alien eating cars. I'm still waiting for that explanation.
My definition of a good video: the images have to follow the beat of the song. If they just lazily throw up whatever they think of with no consideration of rhythm, that's not a true music video. The worst ones are from the bands that do nothing but film themselves playing--there's just no excuse for that. My personal Top 10 from Day One are all staged well and have obvious hard work put into them.
Except for this one. I just chose this one because it's one of Pat Benatar's.
"Gah! THERE YOU GO AGAIN, you idiot! You already subjected us to that stupid Ooh-Ooh Song last year; when are you going to stop??" Never. I should revise my list a bit to explain my thinking.....
#1: I like anything that has a
good strong beat in it. Oppositely, I can't stand anything slow.
#2: I don't like disco.
#3: Country is only tolerable in rare instances when the tune is
more about getting you to move and less about someone whining
their problems away.
#4: I don't like anything the African-American community seems to
like. Rap and hip-hop do nothing for me.
#5: I really, really, really, really like it when a woman sings
about how she's going to kick my butt.
And number 5 is 90% of Pat Benatar's repertoire, so it's no wonder.
Pat is great. I love how she stares at the camera and basically tells everybody watching, "Hey! I don't know who you are, but I HATE YOU!"
You clearly don't want to cross Pat. Pat will moiderize you. Pat will rip your heart out and eat it. Love is a battlefield, and Pat's not afraid of developing the raw plutonium to start producing nukes. You know the episode of 24 where Jack Bauer chomps on someone's neck to do them in? He stole that from Pat. Pat can win a game of Connect Four in only three moves.
The only real problem with Pat's videos is...well, her appearance. She looks nothing like the image she's trying to sell. In a perfect world, Pat would look like this:
But she doesn't. Pat--the real Pat--looks like a mouse.
It can't be denied.
As with the others, click on any
of Pat's photos to see her video.
Note to Pat-haters: NONE FOR YOU! You have to watch this
horrible Elvis
Costello video instead!
I suppose there's more than one way for a video to impress me. If it doesn't have rhythm and decent choreography, it can salvage itself by telling an amusing story. Such is the case with this vid-ditty from "Ph.D." Two guys are competing for the attention of one girl. One guy acts as desperate as possible, begging and pleading her, and offering armfuls of wrapped gifts. The other guy is a little more mature, but not by much...his solution is to kill the first guy.
This one is my winner for Very Best Video of Day One. It hits all my requirements and then some. I must have watched it about ten times after I first saw it.
I can't attach a name to it though. VH1 was going through technical errors at this point and mislabeled this video as coming from The Who, then labeled the next three songs as coming from The Who as well and having the same name. Bah.
Fortunately, within the first few hours of this article's broadcast, several readers filled in a name for me: "Hilly Michaels." He's got lots of money, and lots of time, but he's so unhappy, and now he knows why....so he's inviting every girl in the entire world to his bachelor pad. (And he's lying about the money; he only made two albums and then disappeared. Go fig.)
And I mean EVERY girl. His tastes aren't very discriminating.
But he's only inviting them over to eat ice cream, apparently, so he's breaking no laws.