(Dutton, $30)
I Want My MTV “may be the first book best read at the computer, with your browser open to YouTube,” said Ann Powers in NPR.org. If you came of age in the ’80s, “any given page” of this new oral history of the music network “triggers memories of a classically great or awful video.” For every “Thriller,” there’s a “Rock Me Tonite,” which featured Boston rocker Billy Squier attempting to dance but achieving an effect somewhere between aerobics and epilepsy. Splicing together interviews with over 400 artists, VJs, directors, and executives, the authors have assembled an entertaining parade of “overcooked egos and half-baked creative impulses.”
Not since VH1’s I Love the 80s has anyone assembled so many “mea culpas from rockers who had dreadful haircuts,” said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. In fact, if this book isn’t a pure sugar rush, it’s because such shows have strip-mined the network’s history already. Yet this exhaustive chronicle succeeds in duplicating the experience of watching early MTV: You find yourself “propping up your eyelids with toothpicks” waiting for the equivalent of the next world premiere video. Consider this quotation, pulled randomly from the book: “We fed Valium to a few cats and then had them running around a table while we had a feast with [some] Playboy centerfolds, ripping apart a turkey.”
Alongside the humor, the book “deftly unpacks a genius business model,” said Jessica Winter in Time. MTV’s founders lucked into “an absurdly win-win arrangement”: Record companies supplied the network’s programming for free yet had no say in what was aired. I Want My MTV sensibly stops in 1992, the year the network premiered The Real World and began transitioning into what it is today: “a reality-TV network that occasionally plays music videos.” My only complaint is that the book claims that the “golden era” of music videos ended then too. Actually, music videos briefly got better. The old MTV just “wasn’t around to show them.”
