From its inauspicious beginnings, starting with an August 1, 1981 launch that was available in less than a million households, to the end of its golden age with the launch of The Real World in 1992, MTV revitalized and revolutionized the music industry.  In I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, authors Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks tell the story, using the words and memories of the people who were there, from the executives and kids running the network to the bands and the neophyte directors hired to take advantage of this new format.  The more successful MTV became, the more money started to take over, which led to its eventual downfall as a place to hear music and a driver of that part of pop culture.

It would be extremely difficult to explain the power MTV had in the 1980s and early 1990s to someone today who didn’t experience it firsthand.  First, popular culture is so fragmented and self-service now that just the experience of having someone pick what videos you were going to see, whatever the genre, seems strange.  Secondly, MTV, as it exists today, has nowhere near the cultural clout that it did at the time.  I’m sure they are still making money hand over fist, but they traded their cultural cache to get it.  Maybe the rise of the internet would have forced the issue either way, but a touchpoint for the majority of Generation X died with the end of “our” MTV.