Tag Archives: MTV

MTV Classic: The nostalgia channel you’re not watching

Leave a reply

If you were alive and had a cable TV connection in the early 1980s, you were probably watching MTV.

If you’re alive right now, in 2025, and have a cable TV connection, you’re probably not watching MTV Classic.

Let me explain.

When we moved a couple of years ago, we got a new cable TV connection – same provider, different channel choices – and I discovered an incredible time-waster, MTV Classic.

Even though you’re not watching, you can probably guess what MTV Classic shows: music videos from the 1980s and 1990s. The videos that aired on MTV and VH1 back in the day.

Some of the videos are truly classics. Some highlight just how awful a lot of the videos – which were sometimes treated as art by particular artists but were of course just promotional spots provided by record companies – were. Looking at them now, there are some fun examples that evoke nostalgia and some that exemplify how gratuitous and overblown a lot of music videos were.

MTV Classic shows one-hour blocks of 80s videos, heavy metal videos and 90s videos, etc. Just like the old channel, there’s no telling what will come up in four minutes.

There are no VJs, so no chance to discover the next JJ Jackson or Martha Quinn.

The funniest thing I learned while researching MTV Classic is that almost nobody is watching it. In TV audience terms, it’s really almost nobody.

Since the channel was launched in 1998 as VH1 Smooth – no, really – audience numbers have fallen off a cliff. The channel is available to 39 million cable households, apparently, but only about 14,000 viewers are tuning in at any moment. It is the least-watched English-language channel available to most cable subscribers.

I think some personality – or personalities – might help a little, but one thing MTV Classic does that could bring a few viewers its way is the tributes it airs to performers who have died. When crooner Tony Bennett died on July 21, 2023, MTV Classic ran a weekend of Bennett songs, including but not limited to his collaborations with Lady Gaga.

I’m guessing most people didn’t know that – if they even new MTV Classic was on their cable lineup.

‘I Want My MTV’ book a fun look behind-the-scenes

Leave a reply

Most of us remember what we were doing on or shortly after Aug. 1, 1981.

We were watching MTV, of course.

The channel’s first decade — when music videos, many of them awful, ruled the airwaves and VJs like J.J. Jackson and (sigh) Martha Quinn were our best friends — is chronicled in “I Want My MTV,” the recent book by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum.

The two have compiled the definitive oral history of the channel, which was one of the biggest gambles in TV history. Who could have imagined, more than 30 years ago, that teens and young adults would watch a channel devoted to music videos 24 hours a day?

Not to mention that a lot of the videos sucked.

The book is stuffed with interviews about the early days of the channel, when only a handful of videos were available; the complaints that helped get more videos from black artists on the air; the advent of Michael Jackson on MTV; and the behind-the-scenes of the channel’s daily struggles. To say that the channel’s executives, staff, artists and video crews were drug-fueled is an understatement. Maybe one of the greatest of all time.

A couple of anecdotes were especially amusing.

Many of the videos now considered classics were very off-the-cuff. The director of the memorable ZZ Top videos like “Sharp Dressed Man” and “She’s Got Legs” just happened to have the inspired idea of putting the Texas blues band in the background in favor of Playboy models.

And the video for Bill Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight” gets special treatment in a chapter about how bad it was and how it pretty much destroyed the rocker’s career.

If you don’t remember the video — and I wish I could embed it here (I’m looking at you, WordPress) — it featured Squier prancing around a loft apartment and tearing his shirt off.

The book carries the MTV story into the early 90s, when the channel began airing the first “Real World” season and began shifting its focus from music videos to reality and lifestyle programming.

Theres a lot to get through here, and the authors probably include a few too many anecdotes about channel executives snorting cocaine and too few anecdotes about the on-air personalities and musicians. But if you were a fan of MTV in its heyday, the book’s worth a look.