In the fall of 2006, New York punk club CBGB finally closed its battered doors, ending punk rock’s long-declining golden age 33 years later. Predictably, the air in the Bowery was filled with lamentation. I know because I was there with an MTV camera crew one day shooting stand-ups outside the venue to celebrate his inevitable departure. It was a melancholic moment. There has of course been a lot of talk in the past months about finding a way to save CBs. Can nothing be done? Nothing? Apparently not.
Unsurprisingly, speaking to the people I saw at CBGB at the time, I learned that they hadn’t set foot there in years like I had. The new music there was no longer appealing, and the days of all-night scattering were over. What these people missed was not the legendary dive bar itself, but when the bar legend took shape. And then he was gone.
Something similar rang out from under the curtain on MTV News on Tuesday. 36 years later, his time was up, too.
In the early ’80s, when MTV was a newly established 24/7 entertainment factory, anything seemed possible. Channel, music videos, surreal pop culture experiments (Remote controlThe game show “Dead or Canadian?” that started Adam Sandler and Denis Leary. (Andy Warhol had his own show on the channel, and people like David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, and Pete Townshend were suddenly popping up to sell the slogan “I Want My MTV”—a false defense devised by famous advertiser George. Lois later shunned reluctant cable companies to subscriber offers. nudge them to add the visual channel.)
I arrived at MTV’s filthy corporate digs at 57pearl and Broadway just blocks from their office rolling rock, where I worked before, in February 1988. Despite knowing nothing about television and quickly proving this fact with an absolutely no-scratch camera test, I was hired to help set up an MTV news department. But it seems whatever.
The idea of an MTV news department was ridiculous, as any giggling journalist at the time might have told you. Imagine this pop-music TV channel watched only by rock and rap-mad teenagers, with the audacity to violate the sacred religiosity of broadcast news. In a multi-billion-dollar industry filled with talented artists, flamboyant entertainers, maniacal hype traders, and here and there pathetic clowns and cocaine heads, there seemed to be nothing to attract such audiences.
One of the best things about getting involved in something new is that no one really knows what they’re doing. Or—no, wait: really nobody you care about what they are so called being doing Especially if what they’re trying to do hasn’t been done before. Early MTV was like that in many ways, and MTV News—as shaped by Dave Sirulnick, a young producer who understood the music brought in from CNN for the next nearly 30 years—would be similarly improvised. And disrespectfully, if I let you, it’s a word that’s been a lie after decades of indiscriminate misuse.
I immediately think of Lisa Montgomery—the fearless Kennedy, a VJ next to the news—standing on a platform next to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani at a Times Square press conference, raising her microphone to her mouth for an unmistakable fake blowjob. The MTV teams weren’t happy about it, but time was against them.
There was also the day when MTV received a fax from Michael Jackson’s record label. This was when Jackson was at the height of his fame and commercial power, so attention needed to be paid to this post explaining that from then on, whenever Jackson’s name appeared on the channel, it should precede him. He received the title of “King of Pop”. Dave Sirulnick led the News department to laugh at this, but other MTV regions were persuaded to follow suit. I wonder if this kind of corporate freedom of movement would be allowed today.
I also wonder how difficult it is for “entertainment journalists” to do interesting things without the rains of money that blew in the 1980s and 90s. Record companies eased the financial burden of flying to Budapest or Osaka to meet Madonna, to Paris to meet Prince, or to Rio de Janeiro for an utterly bizarre Guns N’ Roses experience; and helped build “relationships” with these people (meaning a history of friendly and mutually advantageous interactions). But in any case it was all very expensive. And there is also a lot of work – especially really made business – producers, camera crews and scouts (“Bring Snoop here!”).
But it was also fun, and it was often a blast—for example, when filming a smackdown episode at a hash bar in Amsterdam. Now that MTV News is gone, collapsing with changing media and consequent audience attrition, does this mean that the good old times of that lost era are an unrepeatable history? Don’t today’s young journalists have something to look forward to? Please.