MTV's parent company Paramount-Skydance ended several of MTV's music channels on the night of New Year's Eve 2025. In reading about this I noticed a lot of older folks waxing nostalgic about the the network's
good old days, the MTV of the 1980s when it was a music video channel. I think the nostalgia overestimates how much people watched music videos. I remember MTV and the tagline:
"Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll". If what I saw was
rock and roll, it was cold-filtered and watered down by a team of corporate executives.
Of course, some music videos did interesting things with the medium. But overall, my memory of MTV was that of a top-40 radio station. Songs I loved back then didn't need an accompanying visual narrative beyond seeing the band's performance. I can't believe I'm the only one who remembers it that way.
The Myth of MTV's Golden Age
