1988 (I think). It was after I watched a Pet Shop Boys video.I think it was "Domino Dancing’(but I could be wrong). After the clip I saw an interview with the ‘boys’. The were explaining the video. They said they wanted to make a video which had no connection at all to their song.
I thought to myself- ‘Why then would I watch it?’ I am not criticising the Pet Shop Boys- they are two intelligent guys who knew how the music industry worked.
I basically reasoned after that I should only listen to music. I kind of reasoned like Lewis Black -that music goes in my ear and video in my eye. Lewis makes a good point that you get feelings, images when you hear a particular song. They will be nothing like the music video. Lewis says something like if you hear a song many times and get images in your head of/from that song, then you watch the music video and the video is actually what you pictured…kill yourself.
I have seen a few music videos in passing over the years. I do not feel I am missing anything. Recently with youtube I like to listen to songs while doing something else on the internet. Sometimes I actually watch the music videos. I liked the mash-up of Wonderwall and Boulevarde of Broken Dreams. Wonderwall is one of my favourite songs. I have heard it thousands of times. I actually watched the music video earlier this year. Very strange- because obviously my images of the song were completely different.
Anyone else want to share why they stopped watching music videos.
I quit in the fall of '86 when I went to college. Occasionally I’d see one after that, but that was the end of anything regular, because I didn’t really have cable again until 1992, by which time, apparently, the M in MTV stood for something else.
MTV was not a channel in NZ or Australia until very recently. I have never actually watched the MTV channel. Could you please elaborate?
The format in NZ and Australia is usually that Saturday and Sunday mornings and some nights the free to air channels will show music videos for about 3 or 4 hours.
MTV used to show music videos 24/7 from 1981 until about 1989. Then they developed game shows, reality shows, pop culture shows, etc. Now music videos are just an afterthought and only appear a few off-peak hours a day.
It’s a now-old joke based upon the fact that MTV–which once existed for the sole purpose of airing music videos and other music-related programs–now seems to air nothing but “reality” programs or endless reruns of these “reality” programs. The non-music programming gradually started taking over MTV’s schedule by the early 90’s and became dominant sometime around 1998. Music videos are now aired mostly during the late night and early mornings.
I think it’s one of those things that is a joke, but it’s also real for some people, like me for example. All of my teen years were within the MTV music video era, and when they stopped playing music videos, I literally had no idea where else one might view them.
So for me, it was a combination of suddenly going from 24 hour a day access to music videos, to none, and coincidentally being at an age where I was (we should hope) no longer to able to devote 24 hours a day to watching music videos, and having to do other things, like being gainfully employed.
I only just recently started watching videos on youtube – mostly trying to find things I remember fondly from my misspent youth, but now and again I’ll stumble upon something new. I’ve been very impressed with some of the mash-ups.
I think in the early 90s when I started realizing that they were really making me think maybe I should get a new outfit, a new haircut, some new breasts. One day I just really noticed that the amount of time I spent thinking about my looks was directly proportional to the amount of time I looked at girls dancing around in bikinis and gold chains on my tv.
My video viewing went down starting in in 1989 and stopped by about 1992 based upon various factors:
Graduated high school & started college and working more hours
The death of New Wave and the rise of R&B, metal, rap, and country during that period (e.g., Whitney Houston / Aerosmith & Run DMC / GnR). Thank heavens for Youtube.
MTV effectively stopped showing videos (e.g. Remote Control / Real World)
I don’t think I’ve watched a music video on tv in about twelve years. I was in 8th grade. A friend and I went to visit her mom in Gaithersburg. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot to do most of the time cos she was working. We sat around and watched cartoons(smurfs!) and music videos on VH1.
-Lil
Pretty much always. I’ve never really liked music videos and didn’t even have regular access (through cable) until I started college in 2001, at which point watching music videos was difficult due to lack of programming.
I have put it on IMF from time to time with the dish, but I’ve just never been one for music videos.
I remember watching a Beastie Boys or Limp Bizkit video (can’t really tell them apart) and thinking to myself, “God DAMN this is stupid.” Then I realized that most videos featuring people dancing or strutting around were stupid, and added nothing to the music. I still like some really abstract videos (Paranoid Android rocks), and while it qualifies as people strutting around, Outkast’s Hey Ya video is just pure gold. That said, I don’t think I’ve seen a music video in 2+ years, if you don’t count all the karaoke crap that I’ve sat through in that time.
I was already a non-TV watcher by the time MTV made its debut (or at least by the time I became aware of its existence): somewhen in the vicinity of 1982-1984? Anyway, I saw a few of them but was totally underwhelmed. What I had in mind that I thought they should be doing instead was more akin to those abstract plug-ins that are available for lots of MP3 players, such as the G-Force for Audion and iTunes.
The stuff they actually came out with — clips of the band playing interspersed with generally plotless snippets of imaginary dramas, etc — ::giant yawn::
For me, it was a combination of MTV showing less videos and a growth in musical genres I wasn’t especially interested in taking up more of MTV’s video time. I won’t say that rap and hip-hop and all that “suck”, but I don’t feel like watching them and so, as MTV devoted more time to them, I had less reason to turn on MTV and fell out of the habit of watching.
VH1 used to get more watch-time from me before they went straight on into “All Reality TV” mode.
What others have said–when MTV turned into a non-music channel. I never watched a lot because cable was expensive and I was a starving grad student. I enjoy music videos but have no interest in grainy youtube versions.
Even VH1 Classic is bad. They show the History of Rock documentary all the time, which is like 6 hours long.
They also show lengthy concerts, like Elvis Costello and Springsteen, I think. That’s great if you want to see just Elvis Costello for 90 minutes, but…
How about just showing 80s videos all day? Why is that so hard? There’s an entire decade’s worth of material to pick from.
All of my teen years were within the MTV music video era, and when they stopped playing music videos, I literally had no idea where else one might view them.
