Like a bunch of other people, I’m gonna mark the anniversary of MTV’s debut on this date, Aug. 1 1981, with a little bit of nostalgia.

It’s okay, I’ll be brief and get this over with as painlessly as possible.

One thing I won’t do here is bemoan the lack of music on modern-day MTV. I haven’t watched the cable channel in years. I do watch the MTV Classic channel sometimes, mostly for the 1980s videos.

I just wanted to say that, if you’re not old enough to remember, MTV was a cultural touchstone for most of us around a certain age in 1981. I was a child in the 1960s and grew to adulthood in the 1970s, but the 1980s was probably the most important decade of my life up to that point.

I was reviewing movies and a bunch of entertainment for my local newspaper from 1978 to 1990, so I feel tremendous nostalgia for the 1980s. I started full-time at the paper in the 1980s. At the very end of the 1980s – okay, early 1990 – I met my wife. In 1989, I started covering politics and government and sometimes crime, the turning point in my newspaper career.

It sounds cheesy to say it, but MTV and the music of the 1980s was the heartbeat of my life at the time. I didn’t discover it as a teenager, like most people, because it didn’t exist until I was in college. But it shaped a lot of my tastes and entertainment sensibilities.

My friends and I watched MTV and its competitors and cohorts – Friday Night Videos, music videos all night weekends on TBS – religiously. We hauled ass to get to a screen to watch Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video debut on MTV on December 2, 1983.

We were glued to our TVs on Halloween 1984 to watch Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, guest-host on MTV, playing odd and weird videos. I refer to that night in one of my novels.

MTV was notoriously slow to play Black artists. It quickly became a delivery system for advertising. Some of the most pretentious music videos of the era are hard to watch now.

But MTV was a huge cultural force not long after August 1, 1981.

In many, many ways, that was a vastly simpler time. But many things are better now. Nostalgia can be toxic, especially when people pine for “the good old days” that were decidedly not good for so many people.

But nostalgia is okay once in a while. We can enjoy looking back and remember to look ahead, too.