"MTV makes me want to smoke crack…" (Beck, 1992)

When Sting bleated the words "I want my MTV" as the guest backing singer on Dire Straits' 1985 megahit 'Money For Nothing', he was sarcastically parotting one of the four-year-old network's key slogans – biting the hand that fed him, albeit with an ironic smile on his face.

The whole song, moreover, was framed as an old fart's snarl of derision at the posturing of cosseted rock stars – like Sting – on the 24-hour-a-day cable music channel. "You get yer money for nothin'," it whinged, "and your chicks for free."

But here, in a nutshell, was MTV's irresistible beauty: the video of 'Money For Nothing' instantly went into heavy rotation on the network and is now remembered as one of the key clips of the '80s. For the story of MTV, which will be celebrating 20 massively influential years of music television on August 1st, is that it sucks up whatever you throw at it, serving it back up to its massive global audience as product.

"MTV is like a black hole," says Marc Weingarten, author of last year's Station to Station, the first real history of music television. "Nothing escapes it."

I can still remember being hooked by the rush of images – mainly car-clichéd and big-titted-banal but sometimes witty and visually thrilling– that flashed across the screen, and I was hardly alone in my televisual trance. For millions of Americans, MTV was the first time they'd seen anyone like Billy Idol – let alone Boy George – up close.

Two decades on, I periodically find myself gawping at one of MTV's umpteen channels in the company of my pop-crazy eight-year-old son. The little dude is particularly taken with the network's "alternative" channel, amply stocked as it is by representatives of his beloved "nu metal" music. As the tattooed singers of Linkin Park (right) and Papa Roach strike their rage-by-numbers stances, I watch him watching and realise how radically different his formative pop experiences are to the ones I had.

When I were a lad, I heard Marc Bolan or David Bowie on my tiny transistor radio and occasionally saw pictures of them in magazines. Once a week, if I was lucky, I saw these exotic androgynes on Top of the Pops and – until my mother came in and snapped the TV off – felt the authentic thrill of der verboten.

Now my kid flips between ten different music channels that pump out music vids round the clock. A veritable shopping arcade of sounds and styles (riffs, clothes, hairstyles, attitudes, gestures) is available and accessible to him in a way that would have been unimaginable to a T. Rex fan in 1971.

The boomers don't know, but the little boys understand.

An old-school music fan and Mojo reader, Hansen has been instrumental in making MTV as powerful an entertainment force – and marketing tool – in Europe as it is in America. The network is now distributed to 100 million homes across the continent: a staggering figure when you consider that upon launch it reached a mere 1.5 million. (Even more staggering is the fact that last year's revenues for MTV Networks in the U.S. – a cool $3.04 billion – were triple what they were in 1995.)

"Even in a little country at the bottom of the world, my sense was that there was incredible creative energy going on here," Hansen says. "I just thought, these are the kind of Americans I like. They were highly creative, and they were hip in a way that American TV had not been for a long time."

Is there a paradox in this wholemeal Mojo man – Hansen talks fondly of going to Jamaica to interview Lee "Scratch" Perry in MTV Europe's early days – overseeing the proliferation of all this visual junk food?

"I don't think so," he says. "My job is to make sure that we can still create, within that mélange of energy, stimulating, high-end things that I personally would be proud to buy and part of. We're fast and disposable, but we're no shallower than anyone else out there."

"I think MTV signifies the death of imagination," says Marc Weingarten. "Two generations of kids now have grown up with this impoverished critical faculty. They can't read meaning into a song other than the one that's been imposed upon it by the video. For them, the video is the song."

In essence, this has been the complaint about "music television" all along. As long ago as 1986, Chris Stein of Blondie – ironically, one of the pop video pioneers – was complaining that "everybody’s so hung-up on the video shit that everybody forgets that it’s stifling everyone’s imagination…"

Pioneered back in the '20s by German filmmaker Oskar Fischinger, who made animated shorts to accompany jazz and classical pieces, the concept of "music video" arguably came of age with Disney's Fantasia (1940), which synched Stravinsky to hallucinatory cartoon images. Yet right through the golden decades of pop, from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, "music television" consisted mainly of TV appearances (by Elvis, the Beatles et al) on programmes like The Ed Sullivan Show (right).

In lieu of touring, British acts occasionally supplied cheap clips to American rock shows like Don Kirshner's Midnight Special, but few paid much attention to video as a form before Bruce Gowers' epic film for Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in 1975. And even three years later, when the late Kenny Everett was hosting an entire show devoted to videos, he was still way ahead of the curve.

Early in 1991, former Monkee Mike Nesmith's Pacific Arts video company produced an MTV prototype called Popclips for broadcast on the fledgling Nickelodeon channel. Although it was canceled after one season, paying close attention to Popclips was 27-year-old Mississippian Robert Pittman, who'd worked his way up the ladder in radio before arriving at WNBC in New York.

Hired by Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment to explore the untapped cable-TV market, Pittman devised a primitive prototype called Album Tracks, airing short promo rock vids. With crystal-ball prescience, Pittman saw the potential of an entire "narrowcast" network dedicated to this stuff.

Like Popclips, Album Tracks was canceled, but Pittman was like a dog with a bone. When meticulous research confirmed his gut instincts, Warner Amex greenlighted MTV. Launching via 300 cable systems on August 1, 1981, the first clip seen on the network was, aptly enough, Buggles' 'Video Killed The Radio Star', a plaintive electro-pop classic that drew implicit parallels between the nascent video trend and the emergence of "the talkies" in the history of cinema.

Initially the record industry was resistant – two of the majors actually demanded money for MTV's use of vids by their artists – but within months their gripes were silenced by clear evidence that videos were selling records in unprecedented numbers.

The new format was tailor-made for "videogenic" stars from Britain. Duran Duran's records might have stunk, but the band undeniably looked better on TV than Journey did. Which was why EMI spent $200,000 on taking Simon Le Bon and the boys out to Sri Lanka with a gorgeous model to shoot three vids for the Rio album. ("Duran Duran," wrote Dave Rimmer pertinently in Like Punk Never Happened, "discovered that the easiest way to make a band look interesting was to make them look rich.") By late 1983, MTV was being carried by 1,775 cable companies in the U.S.

If MTV was a televisual codifying of rebellion (or at least aspiration) for suburban couch potatoes, the network nonetheless shook the American music industry out of its complacent AOR stupor, making stars of sexually ambiguous Brits like Boy George and Annie Lennox. Pop acts like Madonna now sold themselves as much through iconography as through music. Simultaneously, "MTV style" infected the visual language of everything from Miami Vice and Flashdance to TV commercials.

MTV, noted music critic Jim Farber as he looked back in 1992, was "a kind of free-flowing efferverscence, a nonstop teasing, erotic cabaret of bright colours, sexy rock stars and loud music." Of course, what the network left out of that picture was black music – so much so that an indignant Rick James argued MTV should rename itself "White Rock TV". "I don't know who the fuck these people are to tell people who they should like," a petulant Bob Pittman snapped in December 1983. But pretty soon the Mississippian was changing his tune – especially when Michael Jackson delivered Thriller, the perfect black/white crossover album.

"MTV had set themselves up in a format-radio world, which is the reason why there was very little black music originally," says Brent Hansen. "But it became very clear that MTV was a phenomenon and had to open up. Radio dictates certain formats, but MTV had to break out of that mold." The debut of Yo! MTV Raps in 1988 would change the American music TV landscape forever, bringing hip hop style into the living rooms of half the white suburban teenagers in the country.

"In terms of television in general," says Marc Weingarten, "MTV has been a total paradigm shift." Even artists whose stance has implicitly been anti-image (e.g. Nirvana) have found themselves subsumed into MTV's visual muzak. And even when MTV satirises its own viewers – e.g. via the brilliantly deconstructive Beavis and Butthead – that too feeds back into the machine.

MTV today is an awesomely niched and segmented hydra, with half-hour blocks of programming for all the family – from nonstop Britney-pop for tweenies to greying VH1 mellowness for old farts who despised MTV in the first place.

The network has pioneered "reality TV" with The Real World and Road Rules, and it has reduced complex musical art to voyeuristic tabloid tattle with the "rockumentary" series Behind the Music. Its prime-time Total Request Live show is possibly the most watched music programme in TV history. And yet, with all its success, MTV has created a weird kind of flattening, with every video – whether by ghettofabulous R&B divas or by nu metal rageaholics – ultimately sending out the same messages about commodification of lifestyle and attitude.

"It would be nice if MTV’s music programming was as risk-taking as the people who run it," former MTV News anchor Tabitha Soren told Newsweek last week. "MTV now has enough power and has shown how irreverent and how creative it can be..."Still others accuse MTV of being a virtual monopoly, especially since its 1998 purchase of rival The Box.

"Music on TV has lost its allure as a cultural event," summarises Marc Weingarten. "It's now in every nook and cranny of the culture. There's nothing forbidden anymore."

The end of pop history, it would seem, is nigh.

© James Slack 2001