Several months ago, my son Harley had a friend coming over to spend the night, and I was getting queasy anticipating the Pokimon video they were inevitably going to want to watch. So I cut them off at the pass by renting a fave from my childhood: “Goonies.”
“What’s that? Is it Japanimation?” Harley asked me when I brought the tape home.
“No, it’s ‘Goonies.’”
“What’s ‘Goonies’?”
“It’s an adventure movie. A bunch of kids, without their parents, go on a wild adventure and end up saving the town from the greedy old bad guy. You’re gonna love it.”
“We want to watch Pok … “
“Shut your pie hole, sit down and watch ‘Goonies’ and enjoy it. Or you’re going straight to bed!”
“But it’s only 7:15 …”
“What did I say about your pie hole?”
Needless to say, momma knows best. The kids were totally enthralled with the story, identified with the characters, laughed their asses off at the funny parts. They loved “Goonies,” as I had when I was their age. But watching it again as an adult was a whole ‘nother experience for me. The relationship between Chunk and Sloth made me weep. The line that my sister Liz and I had adopted as our mantra in our preteen years still resonated: “I’m gonna take care of ya … Because I love ya.”
Simple enough, but coming from Chunk’s face, anything but ordinary. Right, good, cryptic, revealing, tender, true. I said to myself, Now that’s acting. Where is this guy? Does he live in New York? Does he drink? If so, maybe I’ll run into him at a bar or something.
After rewatching my favorite Chunk scenes (ice cream on the spoon, tied to the chair screaming and jumping, telling the Fratellis about the time he fake-puked in the movie theater, to name a few) obsessively for the next four days, I was ready to proclaim: I am a born-again Chunk fan!
Liz and I were in the midst of thinking about procrastinating about the possibility of maybe throwing a New Year’s Eve-Armageddon party. We were drinking beer and talking about who we would want at the party, our wish list. Chunk came up. Yes. That would be major. Chunk at our party on what may or may not be the last moment of Earth’s existence: the stroke of midnight, Jan. 1, 2000.
That sealed the deal. We were having a fucking party. Mission: Get Chunk there. But first, Where is he? What’s his name, first of all? And is he still with us? He may have gone the way of River Phoenix or, worse still, Corey Feldman or Haim. I didn’t know what to expect. The first thing I did was log onto a bunch of “Goonies” sites. I e-mailed the sites’ webmasters inquiring as to the whereabouts of Chunk. Several of the kind dweebs got back to me promptly with limited information:
“Jeff B. Cohen, the actor who played Chunk in ‘Goonies,’ may be working in computers in Silicon Valley.”
” … may be getting back in the movie business.”
” … word has it he was the president of his class at UC-Berkeley a couple years back.”
I crafted a respectful letter to the director of alumni affairs at the University of California at Berkeley, beseeching her or him to forward to Jeff B. Cohen — if he was indeed an alumnus — my bleeding heart on a two-ply paper plate (metaphorically speaking: didn’t want a drippy envelope), along with a genuine invitation to join us as our special guest of honor at our Y2K bash in Chinatown NYC on Dec. 31.
Then I sat back and waited.
During the waiting, Liz and I made invitations, rented out New Jeannie’s OK bar on Mulberry Street, the proprietor of which promised all-you-can-eat steamy buns; we booked the Alphabet City Idols to play on the karaoke stage; bought cases of champagne and many pairs of those plastic glasses where your eyeballs pop through the first two zeros of the figure 2000.
Dec. 28: Still no word from Jeff B. Cohen.
Liz said, “He’s dissing us, Norah.”
He probably never got the invite. Maybe he never really went to UC-Berkeley. Or the alumni whore decided I was a psycho and never forwarded it to him. Or maybe, maybe, he’s making the mistake of fancying himself too cool to respond to the likes of a troll such as I. Hubris. That could be it. All these thoughts milling about in my very spacious brainal area, while I checked my voice mail every four minutes.
Dec. 29: Voice mail; I enter my password. “You have one new message. To listen to your message, press …”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
“Hi, Norah and Elizabeth, this is Jeff Cohen.”
No fucking way! Holy Christ on a crutch! Jesus tits! Remember when you were a kid, did anyone ever tell you that if you were to burp, fart, cough and sneeze at the same time, you’d die? Well that’s what I felt like. Like that.
I screamed: “Chunk called me!! Chunk called me!!”
I called Liz at work.
“Hello?”
“Chunk just fucking left a message on the fucking voice mail!”
“What?”
High-pitched screams and squeals, yadda yadda, Liz made a big silly scene down at her office. When I hung up with her, I listened to the message again. Jeff Cohen. He can’t make it to our party. He sounds nice. He’s kind of laughing at us for throwing a party in his honor. But he’s acting like he’s sort of regretfully declining or something. It’s some classy stuff. He gets it. And he leaves his number “In case you want to ask ‘Goonies’ questions or anything like that.” Hmmm. Wasn’t that considerate? He didn’t need to go and do that. Don’t mind if I do.
After I composed myself a little, I called Jeff on his cell phone. I won’t go into the whole conversation, because we talked awhile. But hear me now and understand me later and always know: This is a nice guy. This guy is the real thing. He’s real nice to me, you know? I asked him what he’s been up to, told him about all the stuff I’ve been working on and the subsequent failures that have resulted from my efforts, etc. Let it be known we had a 20-minute conversation. Me and Jeff Cohen.
“Sloth? You’re gonna live with me now.”
The Y2K party comes and goes without so much as a light flickering or an alien sticking forks up our butts. ‘Twas quite a motley crew we assembled down at New Jeannie’s that night, a crowd made up primarily of the disgruntled shut-ins and drug addicts who are fans of “TrollConcept,” the local cable show that I host with my writing partner, Meg Martin. Cohen graciously sent a recorded “millennium message,” which we played just before midnight in the style of an acceptance speech from an absentee Oscar winner.
I was dressed as Hooker Spice for the occasion, and Meg fell facedown drunk in the street outside New Jeannie’s, while her sister Anne discreetly puked in the bathroom. My sister, meanwhile, plunged her tongue down the throat of Joseph Dangerhausen from the AC Idols, taking advantage of him in his drunken state, and then she proceeded to go down to the basement and play her violin for the imaginary dolphins down there.
And so it was that we all found ourselves sitting around in the year 2000. Same shit, different millennium.
But one thing was different: I had Chunk’s phone number.
I aimed to use it. Not frivolously, not so as to make a nuisance of my dumb ass and risk getting arrested or made a mockery of on “E!” When I appear on “E!” it’s gonna be in my very own True Hollywood Story and it’s not gonna be some weak two-minute segment where they show my head being pushed down into the police car for stalking Chunk, and then the whole rest of the story is a feature of Cohen himself. That’s not how I want it to go down, if you catch my meaning.
So I used the digits sparingly. I called him a couple of days into the new year to tell him thanks for playing along, and how fun the party was and how many drunken idiots enjoyed his millennium message. Then when I finished editing the party footage for my cable show, I sent him a copy of the tape so he could see for himself. I congratulated myself on working those follow-up techniques. I was so proud of myself that I bought several beers and a new pair of fluffy slippers from the bin outside the 99″ store on Delancey Street.
Meg and I have been working our asses off for three years now trying to become big, huge, wealthy, jeep-driving Hollywood “it-girls.” In January we finally got some poor wreck to agree to be our manager. So in February we flew out to L.A. to take meetings with this guy’s contacts, thereby defaming his name in “the industry” forever after, amen.
Since Cohen lives in the Southern California area, I called him up once again. This time I got voice mail. Just as well. So I put on my most upbeat, human-like voice and left him a quick ‘n’ to-the-point message, which went something like, “I’m coming to California and I’d be thrilled to meet up with you, if you’re into it.”
No response.
OK, this makes sense. I’m a zany, salty, wingnut dame on the other side of the country and it’s all fun and games until I decide to descend upon his county like a huge, scary, toothy-beaked dodo bird risen from the grave. That’s pretty damn frightening for Jeff. I can appreciate it. So I leave him be. I’m content to have had a few nice conversations with the guy.
“Gee, mister, you’re even hungrier than I am!”
Yeah, right. My ex-husband, Ed, believes I can get away with one more call before I become threatening. What the hell. From my hotel room in L.A. I dial Cohen’s number. Damn, I really don’t want to go to jail and have to miss my big crumb-bun Hollywood meetings. That would look bad for me and Meg. Like our partnership isn’t rock solid or we’re not serious bidnizzwomen in boxy jackets, calculating the square root of rouge, ready to endorse all the enormous checks that come our way.
BA-RIIIIIIIIING … BA-RIIIIIIIIIIIIIING …
“Hello?”
“Hey, Jeff, it’s Norah Pierson calling.”
“Hey, Norah.”
Once again, at the 11th hour, Cohen comes through like a glistening dewdrop in the heap of demon dung that is most of the other people I have encountered in my life’s travels. Jeff Cohen rocks. We’re having lunch on Wednesday.
Wednesday morning it is pissing rain. I’m smoking a cigarette on the patio of my room at the Magic Hotel, trying to predict just how fucking ugly and psychotic I’m going to look — bedraggled and soggy and unpretty and unsane — by the time my appointment with Jeff rolls around. Weather really affects me. I do well in sunshine.
But as they say out there in Hollywood, there are no small parts, only small assholes. So, come Wednesday, Meg and I go off to our second day of exhausting L.A. meet ‘n’ greets. (Sideline: That is the most enraging term in the universe. I hereby decree a moratorium on the use of the term “meet ‘n’ greet” to describe hideous encounters in which a wannabe artist, actor, writer or whatever has to sit in a room with someone who has lots more money and valuable prizes than they do, and act as if they’re not an envious fuck and that it’s just two really cool people having a pleasant and amusing conversation about how interesting and interested they both are.)
But I digress. The day wears on. It is monsooning and mudsliding. My feet are wet and they stink. Me and Meg are driving along chain-smoking and popping Altoids like there ain’t no maqanas. Meeting, meeting, meeting. We are a veritable pack of wack. Buy us. Buy and sell us. Market us.
Finally, our last meeting of the day before my rendezvous with Cohen. We’re at the MTV offices in Santa Monica. To give you an idea of how the meeting goes, I’ll grant you “fly on the wall” privileges for one snippet of the conversation:
“Actually, we don’t feel so well after that shrimp.”
“Awwwww … Do you girls have diarrhea?”
After messing up the MTV ladies room something awful, I drop Meg’s funky butt off at the airport and race like the dickens to get to Cohen. I finally make it to his office, but I put a big dent in my rental car when I scrape a concrete pillar in the underground parking dungeon. I guess I’m nervous. I take the elevator to the third floor and the receptionist says, “Hello.”
“Hi, I’m Norah Pierson here to see Jeff Cohen?”
I say it like a question, as if to ask, “Am I a fucking retard, or what?”
The receptionist makes a face, which indicates yes, I am a fucking retard, and yes, Cohen has in fact been telling all his colleagues about his very own stalker from New York, who’s come to town to pay him a little courtesy call.
“Have a seat.”
I do. Cohen keeps me waiting for 15 minutes. The saucy thing.
When he comes off the elevator, I don’t recognize him at first. He’s lost the whole chubby-cheek action. I expect him to have grown up into a big guy, like a mountain, but he hasn’t. He’s a very manageable, fit, 5-foot-8 or so.
“Hi, Norah.”
This is him? He knows what I look like because he’s seen the tape of the cable show I sent him. As he’s walking toward me I make out the Chunk eyes, Chunk smile, Chunk forehead. Ladies, we have a winner.
As Cohen approaches, I try not to cry or have a dumb expression on my face. I stand up and shake his hand, then follow him back to his office. Some random hallway people look at me. They may or may not be snickering. Or maybe I’m paranoid. Who knows? Who the fuck cares? I’m hanging with Chunk! I can die a happy troll.
Cohen and I chat in his office for a few minutes and then on his suggestion we go to the Regent Hotel, a fancy-schmancy spot where Warren Beatty has allegedly fucked a lot of people, and there’s a lounge where you can get shithoused in style. Cohen is so goddamn adorable, let me clarify: He is wearing some kind of brown and tan sweater in the Gap family, khakis, I think, or maybe jeans, something casual. His hair is wavy, but not curly like when he was a kid, and he’s very clean-cut. No unnecessary oils or greases. No foul or cologny odor. He has sparkly eyes and a fun, contagious smile. He is so excellent. Do you know what I mean? Very excellent to be around.
I’m not nervous to be sitting here with him. As soon as the initial impact of seeing Chunk grown up before my very eyes wears off, I feel like I’m right where I should be. Cohen and I get along real well. I think he’s more nervous than I am, because what I did is pretty weird. I try to make him feel comfortable and safe in the knowledge that I’m not out for blood or babies or anything demented or dirty. We have good conversation.
We don’t talk so much about “Goonies,” though I do get a quick Feldman update and some news about the Chinese invention kid, who Cohen happened to remain good friends with. Mostly we talk about normal stuff: my asinine range of hairstyles during adolescence and the ensuing mental scars I bear, his experiences and family, likes and dislikes, and we compare hobbies and knickknack collections — that kind of thing.
When I refer to Miss Hannigan in “Annie,” he doesn’t skip a beat. We both agree that Carol Burnett did a very good job in the role. That was a bonding moment for me and Jeff.
A couple hours, a couple drinks and a crapload of olives and cheezysnacks later, it’s time to say goodbye. I know if I drink any more I will be pulling a Mister Magoo on the freeway and I was already flipped off by Mark Wahlberg earlier in the week for driving too slow in front of him. (You don’t need to rub it in my face, Marky Mark: I can’t drive so swell.) So I’m not game to try my hand at the drunken-driving thing.
Cohen and I part at the elevator bank. We share a friendly, platonic “nice ta meetcha” embrace, and I remind him of his promise to let me take him out to dive bars the next time he’s in New York. That might happen. If it does, I’ll be psyched. I could be friends with this guy, this Jeff Cohen. He’s no-nonsense nice. His mom’s a kindergarten teacher. He’s good people. And what a sport!
Can you imagine me as predator, you as prey? Not a one of you tools reading this right now would have had the balls and/or the decency to call me back if you had been in Jeff’s shoes! Don’t think I don’t know that. But Jeff Cohen is a class act. And I hope he comes to New York so we can hang out again. But even if that doesn’t happen, I’ve got my evening with Jeff at the Regent Hotel to cherish and propel me toward whatever lies ahead.
I didn’t take any pictures, because I didn’t want to be tacky. So you’ll have to take my word for it.
It was glorious.
Back in August, MTV celebrated its 30th anniversary of marketing youth culture to advertisers under the guise of covering great music.
There is no golden age of MTV, although a new oral history called “I Want My MTV” at least argues that there were better times to watch — namely, during its first 10 years. But if you were to identify the true height of the network’s influence, you might well point to the early 1990s. It wasn’t just the time of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — it was Rock the Vote, Choose or Lose, Boxers or Briefs. Presidential candidates needed to sit down with Tabitha Soren, and through town hall meetings, a youth agenda emerged during the 1992 campaign, just as Gen X graduated into the first Bush recession.
Even then, however, MTV really wanted to sell “influencers” to advertisers. In the New York Times business section and other places they didn’t think their audience looked, MTV ran a picture of an alternaguy with cool clunky shoes and the tagline: “Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free.”
Today, any network that even purports to reach young people, even if only to sell them back to large corporations, needs to have its cameras in Zuccotti Park, as the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have galvanized students and recent college graduates as no political movement has in years — at least since Obama’s presidential campaign. It’s easy to imagine ’90s-era MTV setting up a stage for performers — the Beastie Boys, right? — and broadcasting nightly John Norris updates before “Alternative Nation.”
Today’s MTV? Well, about a month after the park filled with protesters, the casting agency behind “The Real World” placed a Craiglist ad looking for applicants for a new season set at Occupy Wall Street. It had to be a joke, right? It was not. “The Real World 27” is moving forward, and kids are going to get real.
MTV is eager to cover Occupy Wall Street; it just doesn’t know how, at least not in any substantial or meaningful way. MTV News’ “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” debuts today, following a protester named Bryan who works on the sanitation team and fights to keep the city from evicting the occupiers. And as part of its O Music Awards — which have noting to do with Oprah — MTV plans to bestow former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello with a special award for Best #Occupy Wall Street Performance, for his strolling rendition of “This Fabled City.”
This is how MTV covers OWS – with a reality-esque documentary and an awards show. Which is fitting, since that’s about the only thing the network does anymore. It reveals a network that is clueless about the principles that inspired the movement and — perhaps even worse — exploitive in the most blatantly corporate sense of the word. Its first response to an important and possibly defining moment was to retrofit OWS to a format that’s easily as old as many of the demonstrators themselves. How long before we see JWoww and The Situation carrying picket signs? Could there be a “Teen Mom” at the protests?
Ever since the synthy strains of “Video Killed the Radio Star” introduced the network in 1981 — it’s been easy sport to bash the channel for its vapidity and youthmongering. MTV is like “Saturday Night Live” — you can’t kill it or embarrass it, no matter how bad it gets.
It’s all too easy to get dewy-eyed over the MTV of yore, and “I Want My MTV,” the compulsively readable oral history by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, makes it possible even to wax nostalgic over a channel that had Journey and REO Speedwagon in heavy rotation, and made us stay up until after midnight on Sunday to watch anything good on “120 Minutes.”
As “I Want My MTV” makes clear, MTV has always had a difficult time untangling its cultural and entrepreneurial motivations, and those problems have only grown more troublesome over the years. Even during the ’90s, when the network strove for the legitimacy of a mainstream news agency, its programming department was quick to pick up on alternative rock, but even quicker to laud latecomers like Stone Temple Pilots and Silverchair. If it had a hand in defining alternative as a pop cultural movement, the network had an even bigger hand in commodifying and defanging it. No wonder OWS supporters are suspicious.
To quote a star from MTV’s early days: “Same as it ever was.” But when people criticize MTV, it’s always with the same line — they stopped playing music years ago. That criticism is older than Rebecca Black, who may be the only video star MTV didn’t create.
No, the problem with MTV isn’t the lack of videos. It’s that 15 years ago, with the growth of reality TV and the Internet-fueled splintering of youth culture into hundreds of tiny niches, MTV made the conscious business decision to hold its audience together by sinking to the lowest common denominator. And it worked. If MTV wanted to define “cultural cesspool” in a time when that’s a legitimate challenge, with all the bad girls and bachelorettes and Kardashians out there, they’ve succeeded wildly.
The network’s shows have grown increasingly pandering and exploitive, pushing the boundaries of taste with series that glorify teen pregnancy (“Sixteen and Pregnant”), teen sex (“Skins,” a remake of a British show) and cultural stereotyping (“Jersey Shore”). Someplace, Kurt Loder is rolling in his grave because he can’t actually be alive to see this.
Trash entertainment has a place in pop culture, of course. But unlike the works of lowbrow auteurs like John Waters or Russ Meyers — or even Chuck Lorre — there is no larger social mission here, no perspective, no integrity. There aren’t even any cheap thrills. Watching the cast of “Jersey Shore” get drunk and say stupid shit again is losing its novelty, and the series’ season finale saw a precipitous drop in viewers. And when there’s a legitimate youth movement in the street, where’s MTV? Catching up.
But one promising sign might be the revival of “Beavis and Butt-head,” Mike Judge’s animated series about too doofuses whose love of fire, boobs and rock somehow allows them to comment incisively on pop culture. For most of a typical episode, they simply sit on the couch and make fun of music videos. These days, “Beavis and Butt-head” skewers MTV programming like “Jersey Shore” and “True Life.”
Beavis and Butthead don’t hold back, either: These segments are hilarious, smart and vicious. Does the show signal a sea change in the network’s understanding of its own product or, as usual, is MTV jumping belatedly on the MTV-bashing bandwagon? At the very least, it unites so many of us in our hatred of what MTV has become.
The following story is an excerpt from chapter one of Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s new oral history of MTV, “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution.”
BILLY GIBBONS, ZZ Top: One night I got a phone call from Frank Beard, our drummer. He said, “Hey, there’s a good concert on TV. Check it out.” So a couple of hours went by while I watched TV, and I called him back and said, “How long does this concert last?” He said, “I don’t know.” Twelve hours later, we were still glued to the TV. Finally somebody said, “No, it’s this 24-hour music channel.” I said, “Whaaaat?” MTV appeared suddenly — unheralded, unannounced, un-anything.
STEVIE NICKS, Fleetwood Mac: I was living in the Pacific Palisades and I would sit on the end of my bed, watching video after video, just stupefied.
DAVE NAVARRO, Jane’s Addiction: I was 14 when MTV came on the air. My record collection at the time consisted mainly of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, and here I was being exposed to a cross section of hard rock, new wave and pop music. I still listen to Musical Youth every day. Okay, maybe not.
DAVE GROHL, Nirvana: It seemed like a transmission from some magical place. Me and all my friends were dirty little rocker kids in suburban Virginia, so we spent a lot of our time at the record store or staring at album covers. With music videos, there was a deeper dimension to everything. On Friday nights, you’d go to a friend’s house to get fucked up before going out to a party, and you’d have MTV on.
“WEIRD AL” YANKOVIC: I was living in a $300-a-month apartment in Hollywood with a Murphy bed and a tiny TV, but man, I wanted my MTV. It was a luxury for me to get cable TV. I would watch all day long. At the time, MTV felt like a local, low-budget station. The VJs would make glaring errors, or forget to turn off their mics. I mean, it was horribly produced and
great. I felt like, This is television for me.
JANET JACKSON: I loved watching it. How exciting back then, being a teenager and having something so creative, so fresh, so new. It was about waiting for your favorite video, and not really knowing what hour it would hit, so you’d have to watch all day long.
CONAN O’BRIEN: I was a freshman in college and a friend of mine was staying at her grandfather’s apartment in New York. She said, “Come over and hang out.” When I got there, she said, “I’m watching this new thing, MTV.” What a weird thing. What do you mean, they’re showing music videos? What’s a music video? Why would you show that? I can’t stop
watching! We watched for six hours. It’s one of those things you can’t describe to anyone who’s younger than you, like the first year of “Saturday Night Live.” It was like a comet streaking across the sky.
DAVE MUSTAINE, Megadeth: My mom moved out when I was 15, so I’d been living alone in my apartment for a few years. People would ditch school, come over, buy pot from me and watch MTV. I’m telling you, man, I had the coolest house in the town.
LARS ULRICH, Metallica: I lived with my parents, and we didn’t have cable TV. We had three channels, and PBS. Dave Mustaine was a couple years older, and he had cable. And as I’m sitting here now, I can clearly see his apartment. In the right-hand corner, under the window, there was a wood-cabinet television and it was tuned to MTV 24/7.
LENNY KRAVITZ: The first time I saw MTV, I was on vacation with my parents in the Bahamas. They had MTV in the hotel we were staying at. It was beautiful outside, 80 degrees and sunny, and I spent the whole week in my hotel room, watching MTV. My parents were like, “My God, what is wrong with you?” I did not want to come out. I just wanted to watch videos all day. Duran Duran, Prince, Hall & Oates, Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Talking Heads, Bow Wow Wow, Haircut 100, Adam & the Ants. That’s when MTV was MTV. God bless MTV, but it ain’t MTV no more.
LADY GAGA: The ’80s was such a magical time. We’d just come off Bowie’s ’70s glam rock, and disco was spiraling into this incredible synthetic music. Everything was so theatrical. Once the video was born, all these visuals found a new medium.
PATTY SMYTH, Scandal: I remember watching MTV at my boyfriend’s house in Gladwyne, Penn., in the summer of ’81. A year later, I was on it.
PAT BENATAR: I was in a hotel in Oklahoma, just this little roadside motel, and it was one of only about eight places in the United States that actually had MTV on the day that it aired. We were all sitting on my bed — the whole band, my manager, everybody — with our mouths open. I’m telling you, within a week, we couldn’t go anywhere without being
recognized. It changes everything, in one week.
AL TELLER, record executive: The timing of MTV was perfect. The music industry was in the doldrums and trying desperately to reinvent itself.
CHRIS ISAAK: I had a TV that was from, like, 1959, a portable with rabbit ears and tinfoil. I got two and a half channels, and MTV was not one. My buddy was a photographer for the San Francisco 49ers, and it was a big treat when I went to babysit his kid, because I could watch MTV. At first, it was almost underground or counterculture. I don’t think people had
gotten to the payola yet.
BRET MICHAELS, Poison: I was 18 or 19, working as a fry cook and maintenance man, and singing in a covers band. We got cable just so we could watch MTV. I’d go to parties, and girls would ask me, “Why are you watching the TV?” I’d say, “I’m waiting for Van Halen.” I’d sit there with a little smokage and wait for their video to come on.
MICHAEL IAN BLACK, comedian: We did not have cable. Cable was for millionaires. I grew up in Hillsborough, N. J., a terrible place, but there was a local UHF station, U68, that hopped on the MTV bandwagon. If the weather was clear and the antenna was pointed just so, we could watch videos on U68. It was a ghetto MTV.
CHYNNA PHILLIPS, Wilson Phillips: I saw MTV the first day it aired. I was in New Jersey, visiting my dad, and our friend had MTV. We all crowded around the TV, and “Video Killed the Radio Star” played. I was hooked.
DAVE HOLMES, MTV VJ: I grew up in St. Louis, and when I was 10, somebody told me there was gonna be a thing called MTV and it was just gonna show music videos. First of all, I didn’t believe them. And second, I thought, If that’s true, it’s the greatest thing in the world.
B-REAL, Cypress Hill: I think it was the greatest invention ever.
RICHARD MARX: I spent a ton of time watching MTV. I’d set my VHS machine to extended-play mode, to get six hours on a cassette. I videotaped midnight to 6 A.M., because they’d play videos overnight that they wouldn’t play during the day. I was studying it as well.
SEBASTIAN BACH, Skid Row: I’m from Canada, where there was no MTV. Every summer, my dad would send me and my sister to California to be with my grandma. I went to my cousin’s basement, put on the TV, and saw the Scorpions on fuckin’ television. I was a huge heavy metal fan, and I couldn’t believe my cousin had the Scorpions on his TV set! I didn’t leave the basement all summer. His parents said, “Are you okay? Do you do this at home?” I’m like, “I’ve never seen music videos, so you’ve got to leave me alone.”
CHUCK D, Public Enemy: These days, everybody has a hi-def camcorder in their pocket. It’s accepted with shrugging shoulders. “Okay, so what? A video.” But back then, it was a main event.
RUDOLF SCHENKER, Scorpions: We came on an American tour in 1982 and I exactly remember every night coming from the concert into the hotel. I went in the room, switched immediately MTV on. It was so fantastic.
NANCY WILSON, Heart: Everybody wanted their MTV so bad. I remember craving it like crazy.
ANN WILSON, Heart: It was like the difference between silent films and talkies. All of a sudden, records could be seen. You could just put it on and party around the TV.
JANE WIEDLIN, Go-Go’s: It was the go-to place to find new music, and you could find out right away what you need to know about a band, like if you liked their style or if they were cute.
STEVIE NICKS: When “Video Killed the Radio Star” came out, we took it with a grain of salt. We thought, Well, video’s not gonna kill the radio star. It did. The song was prophetic.
Excerpt from I WANT MY MTV © 2011 by Craig Marks & Rob Tannenbaum. Published by Dutton, A Member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Excerpted with permission from the publisher. All Rights Reserved.
I love Massive Music Moments.
I live for those times when an album explodes throughout American society as more than a product — but as a piece of art that speaks to our deepest longings and desires and anxieties. In these Moments, an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it’s impossible to ignore it. But you don’t want to ignore it, because the songs are holding up a mirror and telling you who we are at that moment in history.
These sorts of Moments can’t be denied. They leave an indelible imprint on the collective memory; when we look back at the year or the decade or the generation, there’s no arguing that the album had a huge impact on us. It’s pop music not just as private joy, but as a unifier, giving us something to share and bond over.
Actually, I should say I loved Massive Music Moments. They don’t really happen anymore.
The epic, collective roar — you know, the kind that followed “Thriller,” “Nevermind,” “Purple Rain,” “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” and other albums so gigantic you don’t even need to name the artist — just doesn’t happen today. Those Moments made you part of a large tribe linked by sounds that spoke to who you are or who you wanted to be. Today there’s no Moments, just moments. They’re smaller, less intense, shorter in duration and shared by fewer people. The Balkanization of pop culture, the overthrow of the monopoly on distribution, and the fracturing of the collective attention into a million pieces has made it impossible for us to coalesce around one album en masse. We no longer live in a monoculture. We can’t even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.
If you’re under 25, you’ve never felt a true Massive Music Moment. Not Lady Gaga. Not Adele. Not even Kanye. As the critic Chuck Klosterman has written, “There’s fewer specific cultural touchstones that every member of a generation shares.” Sure, Gaga’s “The Fame Monster” spawned several hit singles. Adele’s “21″ and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” were massively popular. Kanye’s brilliant “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was beloved and controversial and widely discussed enough to give a glimpse into the way things used to be. But those successes don’t compare to the explosive impact that “Thriller” and “Nevermind” had on American culture — really, will anyone ever commemorate “21″ at 20, the way the anniversary of Nirvana’s album has been memorialized in the last month?
Numbers don’t tell the whole story about how these cultural atomic bombs detonated and dominated pop culture. But at its peak, “Thriller” sold 500,000 copies a week. These days, the No. 1 album on the Billboard charts often sells less than 100,000 copies a week. What we have today are smaller detonations, because pop culture’s ability to unify has been crippled.
I miss Moments. I love being obsessed by a new album at the same time as many other people are. The last two albums that truly grabbed an enormous swath of America by the throat and made us lose our collective mind were “Nevermind” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.” They sprung from something deep in the country’s soul and spoke to a generation’s disaffection and nihilism. They announced new voices on the national stage who would become legends (Kurt Cobain and Snoop Dogg) and introduced the maturation of subgenres that would have tremendous impact (grunge and gangsta rap).
Some might argue “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” had a unifying impact on a large swath of America. Others point to Alanis Morrissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” Both albums were important. But did they pull together gigantic diffuse constituencies of Americans? Eminem is perhaps music’s biggest star of the last decade. He stands for many things (the freedom to be antisocial, self-empowerment, the legitimization of whiteness in hip-hop culture), and “The Marshall Mathers LP” was a huge success. But no Eminem disc has changed America or made a true generational statement.
Nowadays my music conversations run like this:
“So what are you listening to?”
“Aw, you gotta check out Danny Brown and Abbe May and Das Racist.”
“OK, cool. I’ve never heard of them.”
“What are you listening to?”
“Cat’s Eye and Ariel Pink and Little Dragon.”
“Oh. I gotta check them out.”
No connection is made. Pop music has historically been great at creating Moments that brought people together. Now we’re all fans traveling in much smaller tribes, never getting the electric thrill of being in a big, ecstatic stampede. It’s reflected in the difference between the boombox and the iPod. The box was a public device that broadcast your choices to everyone within earshot and shaped the public discourse. The man with the box had to choose something current (or classic) that spoke to what the people wanted to hear. Now the dominant device, the iPod, privatizes the music experience, shutting you and your music off from the world. The iPod also makes it easy to travel with a seemingly infinite collection of songs — which means whatever you recently downloaded has to compete for your attention with everything you’ve ever owned. The iPod tempts you not to connect with the present, but to wallow in sonic comfort food from the past.
Back when MTV played videos, it functioned like a televised boombox. It was the central way for many people to experience music they loved and learn about new artists. Thus MTV directed and funneled the conversation. Now there’s no central authority. Fuse, where I work, plays videos and concerts and introduces people to new artists. But people also watch videos online, where there’s an endless library of everything ever made but no curation, killing its unifying potential.
These days, there are many more points of entry into the culture for a given album or artist. That can be a good thing — MTV, after all, played a limited number of videos in heavy rotation. Now there’s the potential to be exposed to more music. But where there used to be a finite number of gatekeepers, now there’s way too many: anyone with a blog. This is great for the individual listener who’s willing to sift through the chatter to find new bands. But society loses something when pop music does not speak to the entire populace.
I remember the night “Watch the Throne” came out — at 12.01 a.m., Twitter lit up with download links and then people quoting lines and excitedly trading notes about the songs and the sound. One hundred-forty character instant reviews popped up in quick succession for hours. Questlove was blown away by a certain song. Michael Smith from ESPN by another. A professor I follow was captivated by both. It was such a rush to be in an intense community constructed around one album. In the midst of all that, I sighed. I thought, This is the way it used to be. Only smaller — even with Twitter to amplify our voices. When you listened to “Thriller” in its infancy, the nation listened with you.
Hollywood, too, is struggling to unite us. “Star Wars” and “The Matrix” and “Pulp Fiction” were so big they changed American film — as well as our visual language and Madison Avenue. You didn’t need to actually see the films to feel as if you had consumed them. Their impact was so pervasive, they seemed to bang down your door and announce themselves. The Harry Potter films and “Avatar” stand out for the size of the marketing and ticket buying associated with them. But did they bring large, diverse swaths of America together? Did they speak to something deep in the American soul?
It’s not just technology’s fault. In order to get everyone’s attention, an artist has got to be proposing some sort of revolution. It may be a social revolution (“Don’t join the rat race!”) or an aesthetic revolution (Nirvana bringing their punk-rock sensibility to the masses or Run-DMC rhyming over rock records). You’re stoking revolution when you rewrite what it’s possible to do in music (hip-hop in the ’80s) or what an artist can do in America (Prince wearing panties, heels and blouses and still coming across as cool as hell, Nirvana giving voice to the disaffection so many Gen-Xers felt).
When you’re stoking revolution, you have the chance to grab the intense love of a large swath of people, many of whom may not care for the particular genre you come out of but still get swept up in your innovative message. Today’s artists are less interested in aesthetic or social revolution than they are all about greed or nostalgia. As Simon Reynolds notes in his brilliant new book “Retromania,” retro — sonically, sartorially or stylistically — is a revolt against the present moment. It’s a plaint that something is missing (quality or purity or realness or showmanship or something else). But it doesn’t offer a solution; it’s escapist. It’s the enemy of revolution, which dares to imagine a new future, not a clearly articulated past.
Maybe there are artists out there who want to stoke some sort of revolution. There must be, right? But where? Perhaps they’re stuck in obscurity, unable to get the push they need. Last week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee meeting, Steve Van Zandt from the E Street Band told me: “Nothing is inevitable.” What he meant is that no one is so talented that success is a given without a skillful manager with the vision and ability to sell them to the various facets of the music industry. “The Beatles would still be in Germany,” he said. “The Stones would be playing a dinner theater.”
He’s right — stars don’t just naturally ascend. There’s no meritocracy in music. Audiences don’t find great bands because their songs are undeniable. The infrastructure of the music business — the managers, the marketers, the radio programmers, the DJs, the A&Rs, the chief execs — all those people are necessary to help put talented artists on a platform large enough that they’ll be seen by a mass audience. But the music biz is slowly crumbling. It has lost its way and its mojo. When businesses have their back to the wall, they’re less likely to take chances on kids proposing some sort of revolution — even though that may be exactly what they need to do.
Maybe the audience doesn’t want revolution. Sociologists say millennials are less interested in rule-breaking and less trusting of the grand generational statement. Maybe they don’t want to try to speak for all their peers. Millennial king Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has no political component. It makes no statement; it’s just a portal to connect with your friends and acquaintances. Facebook can be used to connect politically minded people, but it doesn’t propose anything. It’s a vessel into which you can pour whatever you want. Also, revolutions are generally desired by the young, who have everything to gain from overturning society as well as a desire to put their mark on the world. But the modern audience of culture consumers is not just composed of the young. My colleagues at Fuse like to talk about “threenagers,” who are similar to what others call “kidults” — people in their 30s (and 40s) who are as into and invested in pop culture as teenagers and emerging adults typically are. The older you are, the less likely you are to want pop culture to offer a societal revolution. And you’re not likely to look for revolution from recording artists, who are younger and less wise than you.
With pop music struggling to create the Moments that once seemed common, we have lost something that could bring us together. There are niche joys everywhere, but nothing I can obsess over alongside a million others. Nothing that makes a big statement and speaks to what America is or should be or will be. Nothing that has a chance to pull me closer to my friends and acquaintances in a hallway or at a concert that’s really a lovefest. I want music that bonds me to my peers and my generation. I’m stuck with music that makes me happy, but makes me feel like I’m alone.
Touré’s latest book is “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now” (Free Press).
(Credit: AP/MTV) 
(Credit: R. Gino Santa Maria via Shutterstock/Salon) 
(Credit: MTV) 
Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain and Prince(Credit: AP) 
Lady Gaga poses backstage after winning best video with a message and best female video awards at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday Aug. 28, 2011, in Los Angeles.(AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)(Credit: AP) 
