Being a child of the 80s there is a certain fondness and somethng bordering on nostalgia for MTV when it was music television. There is blurry line as we approached the 90s that this started unraveling. But lets go back to the beginning.

I remember being with classmates for a school vacation activity and it was our fall break. Suburbia in my city was jam packed with kids and the only way to fit all of us in a school was to have year around school. This was a trip to Celebrity Sports Center, it was top shelf.

Saying I was hooked to MTV would be an overstatement but I was excited. As I have mentioned my taste in music was whatever my parents had on the radio in their car. MTV was a portal to finding music I liked. It took a while. youtube.com/watch?v=INROfo…

RadioRaconteur I miss the MTV from the start up until about 1992 or 93.

The first video played on the channel was "Video Killed the Radio Star" which was maybe more ironic at the time but it prove telling for radio decades later. Wlso my love for The Buggles grew in that time too, but I was just a kid then...youtube.com/watch?v=W8r-tX…

Regime Dick Sucking Run opened for Electric Six back in 2021

Music was becoming a visual medium and that favored pretty musicians. I won't say music video killed these acts but it felt like they took a back seat. So as the 80s rolled on the pecking order for acts also shifted.

But what broke the back of MTV and music videos? I'd say two things. First was MTV sort of gamifying music videos which I recall a summer of 88 where Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" reigned supreme as the top video, then... youtube.com/watch?v=0UIB9Y…

Bon Jovi overtook them with (I think) their song "Bad Medicine" which started my lifelong loathing of Bon Jovi. It is irrational, but it talks to my preference of well engineered music versus sloppy music. A start, I knew what I didn't like. youtube.com/watch?v=eOUtsy…

I think this contest for best video shifted things, from playing various popular videos to exclusively programming around popular videos. If that makes sense. Next thing is gonna be an unpopular take. In radio this would be akin to shortening playlists.

Where I think MTV started to slowly die was the show Remote Control, hosted by the late great Ken Ober. I'll be honest I loved this show, but I also think it showed network execs that they aught to do more than play videos people loved. youtube.com/watch?v=_waO3f…

Remote Control was a profound shift on MTV and as they years would roll on we would see more programming (often stunt programming) that superseded music videos and ultimately pushed them to the background of a channel that was music television.

It would have been in this programming fugue state that my music tastes firmed up and I started a brief foray into metal. I did not need MTV, or really want it. I listened to a lot of Z-Rock (in AM STEREOOOOO!!!!).

But I still think about the good old days of MTV where bands like DEVO, J Geils Band and others still intermixed with pretty bands and it was a wild west of content. Like most things, it didn't last and that's ok.

Today ZARD since 1991 would have turned 58, but she left the world at 40. She was an iconoclast and voice of GenX Japan. All she wanted was her music to stand the test of time, 18 years later has shown that. RIP Izumi Sakai.

This lovely shot of Mt Fuji took me a longer than I care to admit to figure out where it was taken, which was Chosun Rock. Looking at the pin, this looks like quite a hike to get to.

A very long time ago AndrewBreitbart and I were chatting and the subject of The Last Polka came up. We agreed it is one of the finest comedic bits. I miss Andrew. youtube.com/watch?v=5TfhlJ…

Spend way too much time updating the metadata for ZARD's Single Collection 20th Anniversary. Now all under the same album title, broken out by "part of set" then changed all title to Romaji. It is a staggering number of singles for a 15 year career before her death in 2007.