Now I’m only 29-and-a-half but I remember very clearly the first time I ever heard of MTV. I was four or five (okay, it wasn’t THAT clear) and I was running over to the neighbor’s house to tell them that we were getting “cable.” I wasn’t sure what that meant but I knew it was exciting. I also knew that nobody else on the street even had it yet. “The kids” (as we called our three sibling neighbors) were all outside and one of them (Stephanie, I think) asked, “Are you gonna have MTV?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Duh!” she said. And all the kids (again, just the three of them) looked at me like I had just asked what Atari was. “It’s MUSIC television!” her sister Jessica informed me.
“I don’t know,” I said, “I’ll go check.”
Once the cable guy had hooked up our brown, faux-wood-paneled box, my sister showed me how to use it. Now I couldn’t reach it but I really liked how we could move that white pointer and it shined a light on each number. When she got to channel 14 I knew that THIS was what “the kids” were talking about. MTV—MUSIC TELEVISION.
The video that was playing had a bunch of people wearing body paint. I don’t remember what the song was or who sang it but everybody looked gross to me. I have this vague memory of them getting up from lawn chairs in a ripple effect. “Ew,” I said, and I began to feel nauseous. (A lot of things made me nauseous back then including old paintings but that’s another blog). I also remember seeing the video of “Sweet Dreams” by Eurythmics and getting even more nauseous. (I had flash backs when Martha Stewart used that song on her Apprentice.) That was it. I would never watch MTV again—especially if I was eating.
“Turn the channel! Turn the channel!” I would scream if my sister tried to watch videos while I ate a cheese sandwich. Really, she had me as her hostage since I couldn’t reach the cable box without a chair. But I refused to watch so I missed most of the videos of the 80’s thanks to this handicap of mine. I didn’t like hair bands (even Bon Jovi) because they were grody in my book.
I decided in the 90’s that I could handle watching MTV again. My stomach was stronger and glam rock was pretty much over. But then when I turned on channel 14 (and I could reach it by now) there weren’t any videos anymore.
So when my own “the kids” ask me what it was like being one of the pioneer viewers of MTV all I can say is “there was a lot of body paint and then mommy would feel like she had to puke.” How glam.
4 comments:
One of Phil Collins' videos used to give me nightmares as a child. That one that was just a close up of his head and kinda had a red tint...freaky stuff. That video and Talking Heads' "Burning Down the House."
I guess I must have opened my eyes sometime because I remember the Phil Collins one.
When MTV debuted, nothing else was ever on our TV. Except if we changed it to HBO to watch "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" for the 900th time. None of it scared me, but I was much older than you. When I was that age, Starsky and Hutch scared me.
My brothers tried to watch scrambled Cinemax After Dark, aka Skinemax. They showed a lot of those Emmanuelle movies.
We may have been fancy enough for cable but certainly not for HBO!
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