1987
This segment from MTV in August 1987 illustrates how MTV promos and bumpers, as well as an unorthodox visual strategy, help define 120 Minutes and separate it from MTV’s typical flow. Immediately following an ad for Rolling Stone is a promo produced by future music video and movie director Mark Pellington, which evokes Stan Brakhage films while collaged narration describes television as the result of endless experimentation. Host Kevin Seal sits in a darkly lit studio, and tells viewers “electro pop” is making a comeback, then introduces a video by Erasure.
MTV prided itself on the ability to break new acts, and worked closely with record labels to develop new bands. The "Hip Clip of the Week" was a successful way of highlighting videos for such acts, distinguishing them from the rest of the video flow. More importantly, those clips selected would be programmed more often. The "Hip Clip" was later expanded into the "Buzz Bin" so that multiple clips could share a similar designation. As is evident from this promo, being "hip" did not have to do with the genre of music, as the acts here include World Party, Cutting Crew, and Whitesnake.
This segment of 120 Minutes hosted by Alan Hunter in May 1987 features footage shot on camcorder by winners of a contest to visit Athens GA. The incorporation of amateur video was an important trend in the early 1990s and early "reality tv". In this case, it was facilitated by the unique economics and programming practices of MTV, which in the mid-1980s began to turn its popular contests into programming. The contest was sponsored by IRS Records, and we see footage of some IRS bands. Previously, IRS had produced a show airing on MTV on Sundays, IRS's The Cutting Edge. “What would you rather do, hang out on a beach with Bon Jovi or hangout with Love Tractor in a haunted church with where Michael Stipe used to live?” Alan Hunter asks the 120 Minutes audience. A smaller slice of the MTV audience in 1987 would indeed prefer Love Tractor, and 120 Minutes cultivated that audience before the music genre was labeled "alternative."
In September 1987, MTV advertised a “new fall season” for the first time, as if it was a normal TV channel. This promo mentioned MTV’s new “shows” Club MTV, MTV’s Passport, and The Week in Rock, as well as the syndicated old episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. This all in addition to the “baddest” new videos—a reference to Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” There would also be were promotional contests like those that MTV had held from the beginning, but which the network was now routinely transforming into programming events. In this case, it’s the “Motley Cruise to Nowhere.”
This promo for Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes (arguably the first non-music based original program on MTV) aired just prior to Warhol's death, which cut the series short. In it, you see an explicit appeal to what Raymond Williams called "mobile privatisation"--the way in which television was said to allow travelling away from home, within the comfort of home. Here the narrator encourages us to "take a ride downtown" to see art, fashion, music, and more.
A segment with singer Gregory Abbot ends with his music on the soundtrack, connecting to actor Judd Nelson who talks about how it was somehow fashionable for the US to bomb Libya. Then Warhol and artist Kenny Scharf talk about polka before a segment on a new polka band. Then photographer Peter Beard swings and introduces the audience to designer Isabel Toledo who discusses fashion as art. The episodes of Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes which were produced for MTV were few, but the way in which it featured fashion, movies, and improvised conversation presaged a variety of the network's future programming.
In March of 1987, MTV returned to Daytona Beach for its second Spring Break coverage. The network was finding that it could produce cheap programming content with marketing partnerships, such as movie premieres and music industry events. This Spring Break, there was a coordinating contest with the Beastie Boys, who kidnapped the winner and then shared subsequent escapades on MTV. This included A) getting the winner and his friends drunk and 2) getting them in a hot tub with a number of women. One need not flex his or her imagination much to recognize that this was an antecent of many hot-water encounters to occur in the future on The Real World, Jersey Shore, and more.
This sequence from a 1987 of MTV's 120 Minutes includes a number of commercial which reveal a range in strategies, but especially shows the impact of MTV on ad style and content. The most famous of these is a ad by Nike which used the Beatles "Revolution" as its soundtrack. It was directed by Peter Kagan, one of the first to crossover from music video direction (Duran Duran, Steve Winwood) into commercials. According to Nike, sales increased 44% after this ad. While the style of the JC Penney ad which follows is tame in comparison, it is interesting that the ad is about how JC Penney now has an area called "Hot Tracks" inside the store--"the coolest spot at JC Penney" to find the various jeans marketed to teen males (like those we see in the ad) on MTV.
Almost from the very beginning, MTV featured commercials that looked like music videos, and music videos that were directed by commercial directors and--some might say--looked like commercials. In this segment of flow from 1987, we catch a video for Loverboy that was directed by future Oscar-nominated David Fincher. Fincher, reportedly wanted to make a video that looked like a beer commercial so he could get lucrative work directing beer commercials. However, after the video plays, VJ Mark Goodman claims that it was the band who actually wanted their video to look like a beer commercial. Well, maybe, but the viewer gets to decide whether the likeness was achieved because just a minute or two later, a Michelob beer ad plays in the flow. Indeed, it looks quite similar to the Loverboy video, with lots of handheld, jerky shots and backlit people hanging out on the street and in bars. Also of note in this flow is promo fro Club MTV, one of the first original programs (along with Remote Control and The Big Picture) produced by MTV. that is followed by a brief promo for MTV's New Fall Season--a major shift toward the traditional programming strategies that MTV had defined itself against in its earlier years.
In this MTV television flow from 1987, we find an "Art Break" by feminist video artist Dara Birnbaum. The flow comes from the show 120 Minutes, which ran late on Sunday nights and featured music later labeled "alternative." Here we see a bit of a video by New Order, comments from Echo & the Bunnymen frontman Ian McCullough, and the opening of a commercial for Time Life books series "Mysteries of the Unknown." From the beginning, MTV worked to include video art amidst all the commercial content. The Art Breaks project started in 1985, and continued into the 1990s. MTV partnered with artists, providing funds, equipment, and labor. The only caveat was that the MTV logo appeared somewhere. That usually happened, but not always. Here, Birnbaum offers critique of the tradition of male animators representing the female form. That is overturned by a female animator using contemporary computer tools in the midst of images from music videos.
