The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Today's ear worm courtesy of my daughter's morning jams...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWIgEtkE3GA&list=RDEWIgEtkE3GA&start_radio=1

Your daughter has impeccable taste.  

It's not on any version of their greatest hits that's been released by Columbia that I've seen, and I've never heard it on any radio station.  It was apparently released as a single because they did a video for it, and it does appear on the VHS video compilation Columbia released around 1990.  Kinda odd that it was a single and just disappeared.

It comes from 1984's Isolation album, a record I rather like, but it has the dubious distinction of containing pretty much the only two Toto songs from their 80's era that I didn't like.  This one, and another track called Holyanna.  I thought they were both goofy.  Over the years, I've softened to Stranger In Town and even kinda like it.  But it has to be said, I like the other 8 songs on that album much more. 

Yeah I definitely don't remember any radio airplay for it, but I do remember the song from this video, and I'll be the first one to admit that like so many other 80s GenX kids, I spent entirely too much time watching MTV.

Thing about MTV for people my age (Gen Y, I used to hear) is we missed a big chunk of it.  From what I recall, The Real World was the first domino to fall sometime around 1992ish or so.  I don't think the term "reality tv" even existed yet, but I couldn't figure out why I was seeing what I was seeing, and I wasn't interested, at all.  Over the next several years, there were less and less videos, and when videos did appear, they were often truncated and more like commercials in between the more important bits about Carson Daly counting them down, or people on a beach dancing to them, or some fool thing.  

I was just barely a teenager when all that started.  I had to mostly watch VH1 to see music videos.  Then sometime around college, there was M2, which was MTV admitting they didn't actually play music videos anymore, and I got quite a bit of use out of that channel.  Along with another cable channel at the time, Much Music.  I don't remember when, exactly, but at some point M2 also became all cultural reality junk, and VH1 turned into a never ending string of Behind The Music episodes, and eventually, even those gave way to MTV-like crap.  

By the time I was in San Marcos when Michael Jackson died, I was years removed from MTV, and a bunch of high school girls from my home town in Louisiana were griping on Facebook (or MySpace, or whatever I had at the time) about who the f*** cares that some lame old dude nobody knows died, they were missing 16 And Pregnant.  After I threw up in my mouth to learn that there was a reality show called 16 and Pregnant and that they were devastated that it was being preempted to cover MJ's death, I tried to explain to them that MJ had effectively helped build MTV and it was natural and right that the channel would spend some time on this.  They didn't get it, and while I was maybe like 10 years older than them at the time, I might as well have been an alien to them.  

Excuse the ramble, I think my point was that the music-video era of MTV passed far too soon after I got old enough to be interested and watch.  

Looking back on it, knowing what I know now, Empty-V was just another cog in the technology chain that's always driven commercial music.

Sheet music used to be the commercial basis for sales. Musicians would perform concerts or work with limited radio spreads to drive sales of the sheets composed by Tin Pan Alley to be sold at the local general store. Early 10's and 20's until WW2.
After WW2, radio signals get a rudimentary network. Boys from all over the USA met each other in the War, spread their taste in music, and a technological innovation called the "LP" allowed album sales to begin. Invented in the late 40's. Morphed into cassettes and CDs.
Of course, once MTv launched, you could now see as well as hear the music. A visual performance and presence became an important part of a musician's overall impact. As time went by, the visual piece took precedence. As the music became less emphasized, the complexity of the compositions reflected that.

All this rambling to say that technology created the "music business", and we're probably at the end of what we knew it to be.

That's all very interesting-- seriously I mean it. I'm always interested in cultural distintions between the generations.  In general I've tended to think of you as more GenX than GenY/Millennial, but the existence and importance of MTV actually showing music videos, is a pretty important touchstone to GenX, so this is one area where it seems your growing experiences differed from the solid core of a GenX upbringing.

MTV was omnipresent to us.  It was the soundtrack, and the video track, of our lives.  It was on at every party, it not only reflected, but it curated, pop culture for our generation.  GenX wouldn't be what it is, such as it is, without MTV.

Yep.  Understanding that there's 8 years between us (and I'll soon forget again and go back to thinking it's 4, I have no idea why, but this has been happening for all 20 years I've been on this board), it's not hugely significant at this juncture.  I'd even opine that when I was in Austin in my 20's and you were in your 30's, there wasn't exactly a gulf between our experience of the world and how we perceived it.  

But when you look at more formative years, 8 is a lot, and in some respects worth being reclassified into different generations based on something exactly like MTV.  Realizing that you were graduating college right as I was entering high school is a pretty meaningful distinction at that age.

When I was a kid, MTV (or was it VH1?  Not sure...) started re-running The Monkees, a sitcom from the 60's wherein the stars got so popular that they eventually formed a real band and did real touring.  I thought the TV show was great, and my sister had a lot of their old albums, so it kind of got me into their music, which I might now call "Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits For Four Other Guys."  That was the bulk of my watching experience through the late 80's.  Don't even ask me about the early 80's.....I was there but I can't remember 'em.  (Insert joke here about how not remembering the 80's is the surest sign you lived through them).  

I have some recollections of, say, the Bangles (Walk Like An Egyptian provoked feelings in me I did not understand), or Bon Jovi (their long hair scared the hell out of me, at that age I made no distinction between them and an anarchist biker gang) and others that interested me....but not like music would interest me a little later.  No, at that age what I really wanted was to go outside and run around for hours, and then come back inside and annoy the hell out of my family and neighbors with my drum set.  Watching MTV was not high on the list of things which defined my ethos.  

When that time period rolled around, say, roughly, middle school, MTV had moved to a lot of grunge rock, much like the radio, which was okay with me at the time.  It also included my favorite era of rap, and also some R&B acts like Boyz II Men were big.  It was all going so nicely.  We were starting to grow up, and the soundtrack appeared to be set.  

And then The Real World happened.  And other stuff kept happening.  By the time I was just halfway through high school, MTV was Jenny McCarthy on Singled Out and MTV Beach House where college kids with too much money and not enough to do went to places like Mexico and danced outside in their bikinis to shortened versions of videos that VeeJays kept interrupting to talk more.  Dammit.    

(Ok, look.....yes, I did watch more Singled Out than my actual interest in the show should've ever warranted.  But I was like 15, and it was Jenny McCarthy, and I don't think I have to really explain myself there.)

There were still videos on the air, and it still did create an ethos for people my age.  We talked about new bands or the latest popular videos.....but that kind of viewing was less frequent.  It had seemed like when I was a kid, any time you turned on MTV, videos were playing.  In high school, you had to wait until late at night, or just kind of pick up on them as they played within other programs like the dumb Beach House thing, or Beavis and Butthead.  I was aware there had been a time when MTV was literally video radio, always there for you, and that I'd kind of missed it.  It wasn't the same experience for me and my friends that it had been for my sister and her friends.  

In college the renewed hard rock wave hit, with bands like System of a Down, Sevendust, Limp Bizkit, etc. and as previously mentioned, those bands got a lot of video play on M2.  But culture was fragmented by that point.  A lot of my co-eds didn't watch M2.  A lot of them didn't even know about it.  The internet was a growing thing by then and people weren't getting their music from a major unified source anymore, and worse, to my dismay, so many my age didn't seem to care about music at all.  That seemed very irregular as a kid, through middle school and even high school, but in college it felt like it was becoming more commonplace.  Through grade school, you meet somebody, you often immediately start talking about your favorite music, because that's how we got to know each other.  In college, you start asking someone about their favorite music, you might draw a blank stare.  

Dammit again......here I am, putting my years of work on my drumming craft to use during college, I'm supposed to be rewarded with hot chicks throwing themselves at me as I perform with local bands, getting hired at local recording studios, etc......and do these college chicks care about that?  Can they carry on a conversation about their favorite band?  Do they care that I'm awesome with two sticks in my hand?  No?  Well f*** off, I'll go find one'a'them GenX cougars, those ladies know how to properly respect a drummer and they totally get it when I bitch about MTV not playing videos anymore.  

So based on that last sentence, the moral of the story, I think, is that I've been a grumpy old man for years.