Forget about greatest music video. We’d be here all day arguing senselessly and endlessly without a true method to measure what “greatest” even means and it doesn’t matter anyway because it’s “November Rain”. Slash blazing that solo while standing on the dirt in front of that white church, the dude diving through the wedding cake when the rain started to fall, Axl shooting up to a seated position, gasping for air in his bed as if it was all a dream.
That was the beauty of music videos back then. You would sit there for hours after and try and figure out the meanings of songs based on what you saw. Sometimes you were introduced to bands right then and there on a TV set that probably took three people to move upstairs to your room once our parents got a new one for the living room.
The latest music news was BROKEN on MTV. When Soundgarden broke up, our Yahoo notifications didn’t tell us, Kurt Loder did. The hottest girl on the planet wasn’t some reality TV flash in the pan, it was Jenny McCarthy. Also, speaking of reality TV, the entire game changed when The Real World was launched.
MTV… it impacted the music business, social constructs, political opinions (remember Rock The Vote?) and made us LOOK at music… differently.
MTV is 41 years old today. It’s not even close to recognizable in 2022, but it doesn’t change what it did for us starting on August 1st, 1981. On that day, the world changed forever, even if we had no idea at the time.
(Image: AP Newsroom)