New Wave Outpost Forum

Was MTV good for new wave music or did new wave music make MTV back in August of 1981???

Would new wave music have been as popular if not for the video age or was new wave music and it's image perfect for tv??

hmmm.......

"You just pick a chord, go twang, and you've got music." ~ Sid Vicious

Overall popularity? Probably not as much for the masses without MTV. But "MTV New Wave" is not for the most part what I listen to or is frequently discussed here. I never had MTV in the 80s. I had KROQ. It wouldn't have impacted me personally much at all.

Funny , just yesterday I read this blog about the history of new wave and it talks a bit on the new wave MTV days.

http://users.syd.eastlink.ca/~mdalesandro/history.html

Hmm, that is a good question. My 1st reaction is to agree with [i]"or was new wave music and its image perfect for tv??"[/i] . New wave was perfectly tailored for TV and MTV ! With the exception of some bands, most of these artists loved getting dressed up and preening around for the camera. New wave was inextricably tied up with fashion and [i]image[/i]. To me, I saw a lot of young musicians having fun and vamping around; kind of like the drama kids we all knew back in high school, IMHO.
But I'm not sure if new wave really "made" MTV. New wave's emphasis on fun, goofy, colorful videos fit right in to MTV's early evolution, for sure. But there were lots and lots of non-new wave videos on MTV, so MTV would've played on, regardless.

MTV did give new wave a nice boost in the visuals department - it helped emphasize the fact that they not only sounded but also looked a lot fresher than the old (usually hairy) dinosour rockers that were fading out at the turn of the decade.

Of course, a few of the oldsters took the visual cue and freshened up their look as well...

I don't understand why many consider NW as Alternative if all these NW bands were all over MTV?

MTV (at least in US) put a whole generation of people in a state of musical ignorance by promoting only certain music, and ignoring a lot of other interesting commercial music. That was true in the 80's, and still true today.