#mtv2

Today marks not one but two historic moments in MTV's history:

August 1, 1981: MTV Premieres on Cable TV

Hard to believe there was a time before Music Television! Music videos mainly known as “promotional video clips” had been around prior to 1981, but on August 1, 1981, the world’s first ever 24-hour music video TV channel premiered on cable TV.

When the channel began, cable TV wasn’t readily available everywhere. The entire MTV crew based in NYC needed to actually go to Fort Lee, NJ to watch the premiere!?! Here was the very first launch at 12:01AM that first day. It features that original rocket ship, moon man, and the intros from the original 5 VJs Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, J.J. Jackson and Nina Blackwood. The whole entire concept was brand new. It was like there was a blank canvas and everything they were doing was being done for the first time. Already established musicians quickly adapted to making music videos.

The very first music video played was The Buggles’ “video killed the radio star”. People can complain all they want about how MTV doesn’t play as many music videos as they used to (an old complaint) or that MTV now stands for “Mostly Teen Viewers” (an old joke), but there’s no denying the impact it had on music and pop culture, especially from 1981 to 1995. 

For me, I first started watching the channel when I visited my Dad’s house circa 1983. Cable wasn’t available in my town and when it was, my Mom wasn’t about to get it. So I mostly watched music videos when I went over friend’s houses or visited my Dad. Of course you occasionally got your free local music video fix with Hit Video USA, channel 56′s Great Record Album Collection, and of course when V66 premiered in Boston in 1985. Pretty soon, when I went to my Dad’s house I would tape music videos and programs off MTV and watch and re-watch them over and over on my VCR (try explaining that sentence to a child today!). When your favorite band came out with a new music video you would sit in front of the TV and watch for hours until their video came on, and while you waited you’d get exposed to a ton of other music videos and music genres. Of course MTV gave birth to the music video and filmmaking auteurs (David Fincher and Spike Jonze), reality TV (The Real World is Reality TV 101), and even helped swing the presidency of Bill Clinton in 1992. 

For a while when I was a teen, my goal was to be an MTV VJ or an MTV News correspondent. I never actually worked at MTV, but I had a lot of friends who did. I went onto work at another music video TV channel Fuse in the mid 00s and I felt that energy that MTV staffers must’ve felt in the 80s. I also went on to make a documentary about another music video TV channel V66 (check out my documentary Life on the V: The Story of V66). I still love music videos, just like I did as a kid watching MTV! There's certainly no denying the impact it had on me in my youth and teen years! Happy 45th MTV!

August 1, 1996: MTV2 (AKA M2) Premieres on Cable TV

On the 15th anniversary of MTV's premiere, their sister channel MTV2 premiered in August 1996 on satellite cable. Just as MTV was going into the direction of more shows and less music videos (Real World, Road Rules, Beavis and Butt-Head), MTV Networks decided to launch a whole new channel that would be 24-hour music videos, just like the beginning of MTV was.

I remember hearing about this new MTV channel and wishing I could see it, but unless you had satellite cable, you were SOL. Around that time, MTV would have a special M2 hour, in the afternoon, and play an hour of the types of videos M2 had in rotation. When I went to my Dad’s house in NJ, there was one channel on his cable system that would play M2 for half the day, then it switched to something else. I got hooked. They had Jancee Dunn from Rolling Stone as one of the VJs, a great assortment of indie rock music and creative videos. 

While I was in college, our TV was a closed-circuit cable system and we got about 39 channels. Then one day around 1999, I discovered that we got a 40th channel, M2. The coolest thing they did was on Jan. 1, 2000 at the start of the millennium, they began playing every music video in MTV’s video library. They went in alphabetical order by song title. They would go from 12AM-12PM and then repeat, then continue the next day. I remember being in the dining hall talking with my friends about it and it got us excited each day. “Ok, we’re at the letter I, what’s coming up? Gotta make sure I catch ‘It’s My Life’ by The Plasmatics”. The A-Z programming ended around April / May. 

By the early 00s, MTV2 (as it came to be known) was becoming available in a lot more homes and cable systems. Some of the cool things they did, I remember were the “24 Hours With…”, where for 24 hours a rock star would take over the MTV2 programming. Courtney Love took over in 2002. Foo Fighters, frequent guests on MTV2, took over in 2005 as well.

By the mid-00s, MTV2 more or less became a channel that aired reruns of MTV programs with some music videos during a part of the broadcast day. Today it’s mostly shows with some music here and there…similar to MTV’s trajectory. If you watch my documentary Life on the V: The Story of V66 about the short-lived music video channel V66, you’ll see how this regional channel realized in the mid 80s that the music video alone wasn’t enough to sustain a TV channel. Something MTV and VH1 eventually learned. It’s unfortunate that MTV2 which was created with the intent to be focused on music eventually went that same direction. 

More Spooky Season music videos. This is something I found while researching for the Bloodrayne nude mods video. As I haven't had or watched cable for over 2 decades, this slipped under my radar. Evanescence's "Everybody's Fool" from MTV2's Video Mods.

This week , thanks to the Video Music Awards, MTV2 is airing music videos for the first time in a over a decade with different block names and a mixture of decades.