Friday nights provided limited entertainment options for
North American teenagers in the early- to mid-eighties. Most kids were home by
11pm under curfew, far too buzzed on caffeine and nicotine to sleep. Music was
an important part of most teenage identities, and in a pre-internet age,
everyone was desperate for cues about new music, styles and trends. Lyrics were
pored over like religious texts, and album cover photos were studied and
memorized. Radio broadcasts were recorded to cassette tapes in the hope that a
favorite song would play during the 45-minute recording time allowed on the cassette
(yes, music has been bootlegged for decades). It was DIY identity-building,
vague enough to allow plenty of room for creative reinterpretation of styles.
Hearing a new song by a favorite band on the radio was a legitimate rush – a
conversation point for weeks afterwards. We rooted for our favorite bands, and
radio airplay was proof of success.
Friday Night Videos dropped into teen culture during this
time like a creepy uncle who was worldly enough to know and share the latest
trends. It did so with sound and vision. MTV was only available on cable, and I
didn’t know anyone rich enough to get specialty cable, but Friday Night Videos
aired to the public on NBC, starting at 12:30am. We received it in my Ontario
hometown via the Buffalo NY NBC station. I stayed up each week to watch it,
exhausted after a busy school day and a slow evening of suburban meandering,
but I remained wired with anticipation to see and hear something new. Bands
became more interesting than they had ever been before – in videos, they were real
people.
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| Terry David Mulligan bringing the CanCon on Good Rockin' Tonight |
Canadian television jumped onto the free content music
videos provided with Good Rockin’ Tonight, a 90-minute show that aired at
11:30pm (which found me slightly less sleepy than its American counterpart).
Canadian content rules applied though, so GRT was at least half-devoted to
Bryan Adams, Corey Hart, Loverboy, Luba, Jane Siberry, and Platinum Blonde. I
clearly remember the build-up to the debut of Platinum Blonde’s new single
“Crying Over You” in 1985 – and I wondered what happened to the edge that made
their debut album interesting. The video, in hindsight, was an advertisement for
the band-as-lifestyle, painting them as jet-setting international rock stars.
That didn’t interest me much, and it seemed a pretty unlikely reality for a
band hadn’t really broken out of Canada, but Terry David Mulligan promoted them
like Led Zeppelin anyway. Even to my teenage eyes, style overwhelmed their
substance – videos were new, and they misjudged the balance the medium
required. Their brand development seemed inauthentic. Videos affirmed
authenticity in some bands, but they also made inauthentic overtures appear to
be boldly, obviously contrived - an affliction that Canadian bands disproportionately
succumbed to.
Friday Night Videos, unburdened by any American content
rules, oddly focused on British bands, which suited my tastes much better. The
Police, The Clash, Bananarama, Elvis Costello, The Cure, Duran Duran, Big
Country, Def Leppard, Dire Straits and Thomas Dolby were the acts that seemed
to get all the attention. Other than Madonna, FNV may as well have been a BBC
broadcast. More important to me though, the music selection seemed broad,
vibrant, and global. Good Rockin’ Tonight played the sound of my home, but teenagers
want to dream bigger than that, and Friday Night Videos played the soundtrack
of my aspirations.
Looking back, music videos were always really just advertisements
for a band, but they never felt that way in their early days. One of the
earliest acknowledged “music videos” was for The Beatles’ “Rain.” It was filmed
for American television so the band could “appear” on TV without having to
travel overseas. Those UK bands on Friday Night Videos seemed to be doing the
same thing – each video was a surrogate for the actual band, and it bridged
geographic distance and economics. Nobody I knew could afford to go to a City
concert, even if a band toured into Canada, but those Friday night broadcasts
allowed us to “see” the bands and share in the experience with our peers. We’d
talk about each video for a week afterwards, riding a Greyhound bus to Toronto
to scour thrift and surplus shops on Saturday to try and match the UK fashions
(while Platinum Blonde fans went to Le Chateau).
So many bands in the early days of music videos seemed to be
anything but commodities – my friends and I built our identity on the fleeting
cues in their videos, and authenticity was never questioned in the experience.
It never occurred to me that the videos were “commercials” for the band,
because they were never presented as such. Each video played was a special
event – a victory for a band that suddenly became globally visible, and it was even
more thrilling than hearing their song on the radio. All most teenagers want is
the possibility of personal recognition to a broad audience - the dream that
your voice may someday be heard.
Go to YouTube sometime, and play connect-the-dots with 80s musician
acne – most of them were working-class kids who got dropped in front of a film
camera for the first time in their lives. They were blotchy-faced, awkward, and
totally relatable to the rest of us. There was great comfort in that. It seems
that ‘celebrity’ is now the goal with music videos, often independent of
talent. They sell personality, not creativity. I can’t understand how ordinary
youth can see themselves reflected in a Disney-trained kid who has already
endured 10,000 hours of rehearsal. It can’t be the same experience, and I
wonder how it can be legitimately inspiring. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe that isn’t
the point anymore, or maybe it never was the point in the first place – but it
still worked that way when I was a teen, if only by accident. In the absence of
internet-fueled culture, we were grasping at straws, and we were filling in the
blanks with our own ideas. Few Canadian punks could afford a true leather
jacket, but second-hand lumber jackets were a fine alternative. Doc Martens
were hard to find, but army surplus boots were plentiful and cheap. Durannies
couldn’t access fine-fashion suit jackets, but a little re-stitching gave new
life to thrift store cotton blazers. We were fitting in, while still somehow
being ourselves, and we were thinking for ourselves alongside a soundtrack that
could challenge us as often as it entertained us.
Did videos initiate the long, slow decline we’ve seen in the
music business? Did those video surrogates suck the lifeblood out of band tours?
Did they feed an ever-shrinking attention span in young people? Or did the
commercial nature of videos become the point of the medium? Did music itself
become more commercial, and less personal? In other words, did marketing ruin
the music business? Maybe. All I know is there was a time on those Friday
nights when The Cure was played back-to-back with Def Leppard and Cyndi Lauper,
and nobody turned the channel. There was enough room in the user experience for
multiple genres, tastes and styles. There’s something to that.
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