The Day the Music Died

By Gordon Hopkins It is difficult to overstate the importance of music to the young. Music is the thing that bonds disparate groups of young people when nothing else will. The music we grew up on during our teen years in particular ends up informing the rest of our lives.That is why a relatively innocuous news brief about shutting down a handful of unprofitable cable TV channels became a funeral dirge.Recently, Music television, aka MTV, announced that it would be shutting down five music channels by the end of this year. The flagship MTV channel will still be around but music videos will no longer be the focus. So, MTV isn’t truly going away. It’s just shutting down some channels. Yet, dozens of stories circulating describe this as the death of MTV, with far too many of those stories showing a lack of originality by using the headline, “The Day the Music Died.” (See above.)That there was more than one MTV channel was news to me. That MTV was even still a thing was news to me. Like most old people, I have little interest in today’s music. Occasionally, I will catch a snippet of a tune popular among the under 25 set and think, “These young people are the future. If the world ended tomorrow, I’d be okay with it.”The music young people are listening to right now is objectively terrible. My father said the same thing. My father’s father said the same thing. As did my father’s father’s father. While the records don’t go back that far, I feel confident my father’s father’s father’s father also said the same thing.And so on. The difference between them and myself is that I happened to be right.The death (real or hyperbole) of MTV is particularly upsetting to those of us labeled Generation X.I was just beginning my teen years in 1981, when MTV first reared its tacky, noisy, yet hugely influential head.The 80s. That glorious neon-infused decade of leg-warmers, huge hair, Jay McInerny and Bret Easton Ellis novels, acid-washed jeans, “Miami Vice” and movies about rich college students doing cocaine.The decade also gave the world some of the best and worst music ever created, occasionally in the same songs. MTV was, of course, the primary driver of 80s music. Previously, if you “watch” music, you were watching a band play. MTV added visuals to music in a way that hadn’t been done before. Each video was basically a mini movie. It is no coincidence that a great many music video directors went on to direct features, usually employing the same neon-and-glitter aesthetic.It is really impossible to say of the music drove the visuals of music videos or vise versa. As for myself, I remember when my family first got cable TV. There were 20, maybe 20 channels available. It was a huge leap from the three network stations, plus two PBS stations, we could get in Omaha. I could (and did) watch “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” over and over. I could catch old TV shows I hadn’t seen in years. At night, there were the weird, badly dubbed Eurohorror movies that never made it to “Creature Feature.” Still, despite the increase in variety, there was only one channel a teenager such as myself was guaranteed to be playing something I actually wanted to watch: MTV.So, MTV isn’t really dead. Yet, the people most upset about its purported demise haven’t even seen it in decades. If I had to guess, I’d say the strong reaction is that this announcement has reminded people of a certain age, aka no longer young, that they are no longer young. Old timers (like me) get emotional when you do that.

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