Don’t @ me bro.
I know that heading of “The Early ‘90s Were Peak MTV” is going to instantly make some people reading this angry. I get it. A lot of you grew up with MTV in the ‘80s, and want nothing more than to return to a time when MTV was strictly music videos.
But I didn’t grow up with MTV in the ‘80s. My family didn’t get cable until 1988, and even then Mom still regulated a lot of what I watched on television, and MTV was taboo. She thought rock and heavy metal music was the work of the devil, and she also wasn’t sure about rap either.
But as the ‘90s dawned and I was just a little older, she loosened up some and I started watching more MTV. Also, I was just not that into music in my early years, so sitting around watching music videos all day just didn’t interest me. Now this could have been a case of the chicken and the egg. I didn’t miss watching music videos all day because I didn’t care a lot about music, but on the other hand, maybe I would have been more into music if I could have watched music videos all day long. Who knows.
Either way, by the time I was getting into MTV, they were starting to broaden their horizons beyond just showing music videos, and were starting to add other programming. And this is the era that I thought MTV was hitting on all cylinders. It was the “three ring circus” theory in full effect. If you don’t like the elephants, maybe you’ll like the trapeze act. Or in a more applicable way, if you don’t like Headbanger’s Ball, maybe you’ll like The Real World.
When I was really into MTV in the early ‘90s, there was a great mixture of entertainment. There was The Real World, House of Style, MTV Sports, MTV News, all of the Spring Break stuff, the Beach House, animation hits like Beavis & Butthead and Daria, the late night Liquid Television, and more. I also don’t want to forget the sports specials under the “Rock & Jock” branding like the basketball and softball games. But there was still plenty of music videos as well, and a wide range of music with numerous shows dedicated to specific genres.
And it was in this time period that I feel like MTV had the tightest knit “ecosystem”. Meaning that everything on MTV was geared to getting you to watch more MTV. There were constant cross-overs between shows, advertising for shows on other shows, every host talking about the same events, and more. Maybe you might not have been a big rap fan, but you tuned into Yo! MTV Raps because they were doing something special as a part of a Spring Break event and you didn’t want to miss that. Everything on the network fed into each other, and the whole ended up being greater than the sum of it’s parts. Back then, I rarely changed the channel from MTV.
At that time, while there certainly was a lot of programming other than music videos on he channel, music and music videos still made up 70% or so of the daily schedule. I think it was a nice balance. And this next statement may really rile some folks…if the music videos were more popular and got better ratings than the other stuff, then the other stuff wouldn’t have eventually taken over the network. It’s a pretty cut and dry case that the “other” programming made them more money.
In saying that, I too lament the loss of MTV as being truly music television. Give me back the days when Kurt Loder was downloading the news to us in commercial breaks, Cindy Crawford was dishing up the latest fashion trends, stars of music, sports, and TV were battling it out on a basketball court, Beavis & Butthead were making us laugh at crude humor every evening, and we could still see all of the latest music videos set the hottest tunes of the day. And we could rest easy at night when we left the TV on playing MTV all night long to be the soundtrack of our dreams.
MTV had several great eras, but the early ‘90s was my favorite, and what I think of when people start talking about and reflecting on MTV.
You’re basically echoing so much of my experience and thoughts, except I was never banned from MTV, because I was never interested until I was older.
But man, to go back to ’90s MTV…
If they just ran a 24-hour stream of MTV just as it was then on Paramount+, that would definitely get me to sub. I could understand if they had to omit the commercials, but really, I just want all of it, or as much as possible. Just let me see everything as I remember it, and my money is yours.
But, I doubt that will ever happen.