MTV Rewind Lets You Revisit 40,000 Music Movies & Commercials from the Golden Age of MTV

MTV nonetheless exists. No less than, it nonetheless exists within the Unit­ed States, or in cer­tain of that coun­attempt’s mar­kets, in the meanwhile. A flur­ry of pre­ma­ture obit­u­ar­ies current­ly blew by means of the inter­internet after the announce­ment that the online­work had shut down in oth­er components of the world, Europe includ­ed. However even there, some expressed the sen­ti­ment that MTV had already died lengthy earlier than. And certainly, within the U.S., the place it orig­i­nal­ly launched, ask­ing who remem­bers when MTV actu­al­ly used to play music movies has been a com­mon lament for many years, aired even by gen­er­a­tions too younger to remem­ber these days them­selves. However mem­bers of any gen­er­a­tion can now relive them — or dwell them for the primary time — by means of a brand new web site known as MTV Rewind.

The primary music video that greets the vis­i­tor is The Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and appro­pri­ate­ly so, because it inau­gu­rat­ed MTV itself when it went dwell on August 1st, 1981. What fol­lows are all the remainder of the movies performed on that first day, like Phil Collins’ “Within the Air Tonight,” Blondie’s “Rap­ture,” David Bowie’s “Boys Preserve Swing­ing,” and Kate Bush’s “Wuther­ing Heights.”

(Oth­er, much less vast­ly remem­bered entries embrace no few­er than three songs by Cliff Richard, which speaks to the then-incom­plete for­ma­tion of the form of pop-musi­cal cul­ture we nonetheless asso­ciate with MTV.) The positioning’s oth­er playlists recre­ate oth­er eras and genre-spe­cif­ic professional­grams, from 120 Min­utes to Complete Request Dwell, Head­banger’s Ball to Yo! MTV Raps.

Cur­hire­ly, MTV Rewind’s music video rely involves about 40,000, sufficient to make sure any for­mer addict of the online­work a stream of nos­tal­gia hits. However the web site’s cre­ator (a 43-year-old Amer­i­can res­i­dent in Alba­nia, accord­ing to the New York Instances, recognized pseu­do­ny­mous­ly as “Flex”) has additionally incor­po­rat­ed vin­tage sta­tion IDs and com­mer­cials, lots of them liable to trig­ger down­proper Prous­t­ian sen­sa­tions in the appropriate view­er. What could really feel refresh­ing even to curi­ous youthful vis­i­tors is that, whichev­er chan­nel they select, the subsequent video that performs is deter­mined not by an algo­rithm try­ing to pre­dict their per­son­al tastes. Fairly, every playlist is formed by the pop­u­lar cul­ture of a par­tic­u­lar period, with sufficient left-field selec­tions to maintain it inter­est­ing: simply the kind of factor in hopes of which we used to flip over to MTV, again when the concept of stream­ing video on our com­put­ers nonetheless sound­ed like sheer­est fan­ta­sy. Enter MTV Rewind right here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­forged (August 1, 1981)

All of the Music Performed on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

The Com­plete Col­lec­tion Of MTV’s Head­bangers Ball: Watch 1,215 Movies from the Hey­day of Met­al Movies

The Inter­internet Archive Res­cues MTV Information’ Net Web site, Mak­ing 460,000+ of Its Pages Search­ready Once more

The 50 Nice­est Music Movies of All Time, Ranked by AV Membership

Revis­it Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Sequence That Rein­vent­ed Music Movies & Pop Cul­ture

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the writer of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.