Forty-two Thirty-two (I really should check my math more carefully) years ago today, MTV was born.
I first encountered it in 1983, when we moved to Texas. We didn’t have cable in Maryland, where we’d lived previously, and as it turned out, we didn’t have it in Texas, either.
The cable company thought we did. They insisted that there was a main cable in our neighborhood. They never wondered why no one was subscribing.
Possibly because there was no main cable in our neighborhood. It took a surprising amount of lobbying to get them to lay one. So the lesson we can learn from this is that cable has always sucked.
The result was that I did not know what MTV was–and therefore I was very confused for a large portion of my friend’s birthday party. We ate lunch and cake, listened to Steve Martin’s Wild and Crazy Guy album about three times (do comedians still do albums? I can’t imagine why they would). And then, as I told my mother:
I don’t know what we were watching. There were songs, and sometimes there was a concert, and sometimes there was a little movie. I have no idea what it was, but we watched it for hours.
I kept hearing about MTV, and finally, after spending several minutes listening to friends talk about it, I wound my courage to the sticking point and asked a question that I knew would mark me as clueless: “What’s MTV?”
One of the guys said, aghast, “What’s MTV? Are you serious?”
I said, guessing (and hoping) that this would help, “We don’t have cable.”
It did help. Clearly you couldn’t hold not having cable against a fellow 13-year-old. He described it for me, and I said, “Oh, I’ve seen that!”
So it turned out that I just didn’t know MTV’s name, and was no longer an outcast. And I finally knew what on earth had been going on at that birthday party.
(Years later, my grad-school roommate injured her foot and did nothing but watch MTV. It completely turned me off the whole video phenomenon, and to this day I don’t use YouTube nearly as much as I should, considering that I work in marketing. Speaking of YouTube, embedding doesn’t seem to be working. So here’s a nostalgic and topical link for you. Enjoy.)