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.

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.

In the first of two shorts, B&B hatch a typically deranged plan to score with “Twilight”-era vampire-worshipping teens by turning undead or supernatural or whatever it is that jailbait chicks are into these days. (Failing to locate any local vampires, they decide that a homeless man with sharp teeth will suffice because he’s probably a werewolf.) In the second segment, Beavis mistakenly eats a slice of red onion while he and Butt-head are watching “The Bachelor,” sheds a reflexive tear, and is mocked for being a sissy. Beavis recovers quickly, but Butt-head keeps teasing him while they watch a “True Life” episode about a porn addict. “One of my favorite things to do is smoke cigars and watch porno — keep it luxurious,” says the porn aficionado, a bespectacled, tattooed, pierced hipster dork who lives with his grandma. “This guy kicks ass!” Butt-head exclaims.

It’s all faintly amusing, just as the original “Beavis and Butt-head” was faintly amusing. The “Twilight” riffing and vampire/werewolf/zombie talk in the first segment is probably Judge’s way of acknowledging that in a sense, Beavis and Butt-head are already vampires; the world has changed, but they haven’t. The payoff  – a flash-foward to Beavis and Butt-head in a nursing home — is pretty sweet. But it also hints at a potentially mind-blowing update that we apparently aren’t going to see.  Think of how unsettling it would have been for fans to turn on the new “Beavis and Butt-head” and see the duo still sitting on that same couch in their mid-’30s, 20 pounds heavier, considerably balder and still incapable of having meaningful relationships with anyone except each other. I’m not sure whether a show like that would win a Peabody Award for its comic brilliance or get canceled after a week because it drove millions of viewers to suicide. But I’m going to dream about it anyway.

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).

And we weren’t certain which was stranger — the dangling umlaut in the title of the song Gaga performed (“Yoü and I”) or that she continued to appear as the Calderone character for the rest of the evening