I Want My MTV

oFirst, I audio’d this, which made it sometimes confusing. Being an oral history, which is to say, “block of pertinent quote” led into by attribution, all read here by and in the same voice, I kept having to tap back twenty seconds, to hear again WHO I was listening to. Maybe ten hours in, though, I got into the lope of it, and all was great. Also, audio’ing it was by far the quickest way to get this into my head. And I verymuch wanted it all, faster and faster. So much cool stuff here. The stories behind so many of the videos. The craziness of the VMAs. Sebastian Bach still being my hero. Madonna owning the whole and complete world. Prince ordering everyone around with whispers. Ann and Nancy Wilson still being so, so cool. David Fincher starting out on MTV. The story of that Billy Squier video—that being a video I’d never heard of. The MTV offices and hallways and dinners and off-site parties. The egos. Axl being so, so, so late ALL THE TIME. Some vital-cool stuff. Also, it sent me online, searching for a playlist of every video in here. A playlist that doesn’t exist, I don’t think. I took a couple hours deep one night and made my own, but then I ended up splitting it between hair metal and “etc” (this is the split with everything I ever do, pretty much, and, these are both works in someday-progress—suggestions, please), which I think isn’t the early MTV spirit, which was  . . . → → →

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