The Golden Age of MTV — And Yes, There Was One

by NPR STAFF

November 6, 2011

"Ladies and gentlemen, rock 'n' roll."

MTV went on the air with those words, a minute after midnight on Aug. 1, 1981. The first video was, of course, "Video Killed the Radio Star," by the Buggles.

Few people saw the fledgling network; it was carried by cable operators in Kansas City, but not New York or Los Angeles. But within a couple of years, MTV had grown into a behemoth of the music industry.

Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum have compiled a new oral history of the network, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution.

Tannenbaum tells weekends on All Things Considered host Laura Sullivan that when MTV was launched, music videos were almost unknown.

"In fact, if you had said to someone in 1981, 'Do you want to watch a music video?' the person would have said, 'I don't know what you're talking about,' because the phrase didn't actually exist."

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