{"id":1345,"date":"2019-03-19T10:39:40","date_gmt":"2019-03-19T18:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/?p=1345"},"modified":"2023-03-06T17:10:35","modified_gmt":"2023-03-07T01:10:35","slug":"we-cant-rewind-weve-gone-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morganrichter.net\/blog\/we-cant-rewind-weve-gone-too-far\/","title":{"rendered":"We Can’t Rewind, We’ve Gone Too Far"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When MTV debuted on August 1, 1981, it staked out its territory in epic style with a stylized rocket launch, a moon landing, and a flag emblazoned with the network logo thrust by an astronaut into the lunar surface. The first music video to air on the shiny new network was \u201cVideo Killed the Radio Star,\u201d a hit single from the English new wave duo The Buggles off their 1979 album The Age of Plastic<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Buggles were comprised\u2014are comprised, actually; though they disbanded in 1981 after an underperforming second album, they\u2019ve reunited off and on for performances since 1998\u2014of singer\/bassist Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes. Post-Buggles, Horn and Downes both temporarily joined the prog-rock group Yes; Downes went on to become a member of the supergroup Asia, while Horn, sometimes referred to as \u201cthe man who invented the eighties,\u201d co-founded the experimental art-pop group Art of Noise and founded the ZTT record label, where he produced songs and albums for artists like ABC, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Grace Jones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For MTV\u2019s maiden voyage, \u201cVideo Killed the Radio Star\u201d was an obvious choice\u2014or\u00a0perhaps the only choice. Just look at the title of the song, which sums up the nascent network\u2019s mission statement in five bold words. The title also serves as the song\u2019s endlessly repeating earworm of a refrain; falling somewhere between a radio jingle and a schoolyard taunt, it tap-dances on the line between infectious and obnoxious. Radio is dead, it proclaims, and video is here to stay. The past is the past. Move along, or be swept underfoot by the stampede of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then again\u2026 Move beyond that refrain, and the song becomes infused with quiet nostalgia and soft cautionary notes (And now we meet in an abandoned studio\/We hear the playback and it seems so long ago<\/em>). The song\u2019s inspiration comes from J.G. Ballard\u2019s short story \u201cThe Sound-Sweep,\u201d in which an opera singer, having been rendered obsolete by the advent of high-tech ultrasonic music requiring no human contribution, mourns her lost art. \u201cVideo Killed the Radio Star\u201d is an elegy for the technology once used to record and broadcast music. \u201cI heard you on the wireless back in \u201952<\/em>,\u201d Horn sings in the song\u2019s opening salvo. He\u2019s addressing the titular radio star, who\u2019s been pushed into irrelevance\u2014killed, if you want to be dramatic about it\u2014by the advent of the MTV age. Horn\u2019s vocals are given an electronic echo; his voice sounds as though it\u2019s coming through over radio waves from a distance. Modern technology has been pressed into service to recreate the sound of something old-fashioned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This concept\u2014technology replacing that which once seemed irreplaceable\u2014was baked into the DNA of The Buggles. In a 2012 interview at The Stool Pigeon, Horn had this to say about the origin of the band\u2019s name: \u201cWe had this idea that at some future point there\u2019d be a record label that didn\u2019t really have any artists\u2014just a computer in the basement and some mad Vincent Price-like figure making the records. [\u2026] And one of the groups this computer would make would be The Buggles, which was obviously a corruption of The Beatles, who would just be this inconsequential bunch of people with a hit song that the computer had written.\u201d The Buggles are an ersatz electronic Beatles, created in a studio to give the appearance of being untouched by human hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The video was a highlight of the early career of director Russell Mulcahy, who\u2019d soon establish himself as the preeminent talent within this realm, thanks to the videos he\u2019d make for Duran Duran<\/a>, Ultravox, Elton John<\/a>, Spandau Ballet, and others. MTV\u2019s golden boy during its golden age, Mulcahy used striking yet enigmatic visuals to create slippery narratives. A hallmark of Mulcahy\u2019s videos is their boundless ability to be watched and re-watched while still retaining interest\u2014a crucial quality in a music video. On a first viewing of a Mulcahy-directed video, you\u2019ll glean some idea of the story, and then that idea will change and grow upon repeat viewings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the start of the video, a young girl in overalls attempts to tune her antique radio. The radio explodes in a burst of sparks and flames, and the girl morphs into her future self, a cool New Wave princess in a spandex unitard and a shiny multicolor tinfoil wig. Her adult self is played by Virginia Hey, who first made an impact as the Warrior Woman in 1981\u2019s The Road Warrior<\/em>, then later cemented her genre fame in the nineties as the blue-skinned alien Zhaan on Farscape<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

(A Hey-related factoid that has precisely diddly-squat to do with her career yet may be of interest to aficionados of new wave: At various points in the eighties, Hey was romantically linked to both Duran Duran\u2019s John Taylor and the late INXS frontman Michael Hutchence.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hey finds herself transported via an enclosed plastic tube to a ramshackle studio, which is overrun with heaps of abandoned technology. Horn and Downes perform in the studio, aided on synths by composer Hans Zimmer, ten-time Oscar nominee and the man responsible for the scores of films ranging from The Lion King<\/em> to Interstellar<\/em>. Backup singers Debi Doss and Linda Jardim, in matching bobbed pink wigs and sunglasses, appear on a monitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPictures came and broke your heart<\/em>,\u201d Horn sings to the radio star, \u201cput the blame on VTR<\/em>.\u201d A VTR\u2014a video tape recorder\u2014was an open-reel magnetic tape-based recording device that was cheaper and more efficient than film for recording both sound and picture. Prominent throughout the sixties, VTRs were replaced the following decade by VCRs\u2014videocassette recorders\u2014that enclosed smaller versions of the reels inside durable plastic cases. VCRs became obsolete in the early 2000s with the rise of digital formats for recording audio and video, while DVDs became the format of choice for home video viewing. Technology always marches on: Thanks to the rise of easy, accessible streaming video, the DVD format is now essentially obsolete<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back to the video for a moment: So the young girl who listened to the antique radio grows up and enters the video age, an era that began when this video first aired on MTV. The era ended with neither a whimper nor a bang; time simply moved on while we weren\u2019t paying attention. Music videos still exist\u2014not on MTV, god forbid, but they exist elsewhere, and some of them are excellent, and some artists still take great time and care with their construction, but they\u2019ve lost their value as the currency of an age.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I feel pangs of something hard to define when I listen to \u201cVideo Killed the Radio Star\u201d these days, or whenever I watch the video. Wistfulness, maybe, or maybe something a bit gloomier than that. It doesn\u2019t come from a specific personal attachment to the song; it\u2019s a good song, catchy and unique, with a lot of interesting things going on in it, but it\u2019s never made my top tier of favorites. Listening to it makes me acutely aware of the passage of time, as though it forms a temporary bridge from the present to the past that I can see, but never cross. My generation, Gen X\u2014better known at one time as the MTV Generation\u2014has been superseded in terms of pop-culture dominance by the Millennials, who are in the process of being superseded by Generation Z. In 2010, The Limousines released an ironic update of the song with a reworked tune and revised lyrics, called \u201cInternet Killed the Video Star,\u201d and even though The Buggles might very well approve of this kind of cannibalism of the old by the young, and even though their version makes the same point I just spent the last few paragraphs trying to make\u2014that times have changed and will continue to change\u2014I dislike the song and wish it didn\u2019t exist. We all lose our relevance at some point, Limousines; there\u2019s no need to rub it in. Or if you must rub it in, at least come up with your own damn song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, there\u2019s no sense in dwelling on an imagined slight. Give it a decade or two, and something that doesn\u2019t yet exist will kill the internet star. Time and change come for us all, no matter how tightly we try to hold on. As The Buggles once warned us, we can\u2019t rewind\u2014we\u2019ve gone too far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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