Our office obsession today has been this website that claims to have compiled the top 20 videos on MTV each week between its launch in 1981 to Napster’s demise in 2001. Why the arbitrary end date? No idea. How accurate are these lists? We can’t vouch at all. How much time can you waste looking at them? Infinite.
It’s gonna depend on a formula of your ability to ingest pop music + your age as to what year you think MTV started really sucking musically, but we’ve been totally obsessing on 1987. Depending on who you ask around here that was the best year for summer camp jams or junior high dance jams.
We think things jumped the shark circa 1989 when pop radio seems to seriously start sucking thanks to New Kids on the Block and the tons of future adult contemporary hits from Bette Milder and Fine Young Cannibals - about half the videos that year are something we might remotely watch again and by 1990 we don’t want to see 90% of it.
Plus, as you get to about 1992 you start seeing the same videos sticking around for months at a time - signifying the age of the Real World and Beavis & Butthead coming to MTV while music videos get pushed aside.
At any rate, it’s fun to go back and look at the horrid songs you don’t remember at all, the terrible ones you’re ashamed to admit you love, whose skeevy old manager clearly called his friends to pull a favor, what songs were big fat hits from movies and see in cold hard list form what was actually played. We’re always fascinated by the total crap people love.
