Saturday, April 05, 2008

1982: The Monolith


While getting a teeny transistor radio for Christmas, 1981 fanned the flames started by my dad's taping of the American Bandstand anniversary special a couple of months earlier, the grim realities of the contemporary pop music scene circa the end of 1981 weren't exactly setting my imagination afire.

Sure, there were a few decent songs out there in the airwaves, but it seemed that pop music at the time was far more concerned with with breaking new acts who sounded a lot like Air Supply, Kenny Rogers or Christopher Cross than the more electronic, danceable fare I was looking for. My discovery of American Top 40 while dialing around the FM spectrum one Sunday morning in February of 1982 seemed to perfectly encapsulate this sense of limitless discovery-tempered-with-frustration: while I fell very quickly into the habit of following along every week as Casey Kasem counted down the week's biggest pop hits, too much of that thrill was dispelled by ballad after midtempo ballad with only the odd rare treat lurking about in the guise of "Spirits In The Material World" by The Police, "Let It Whip" by The Dazz Band, or "Don't You Want Me" by The Human League. Consequently, my radio infatuation began to dim as quickly as it had flared to life ... the signal:noise ratio was too much to deal with on anything more than a weekly basis.

Fate intervened quickly: two things arrived on the scene in the metro Detroit area in 1982 that not only refueled my already-flagging interest but supercharged it into a lifelong obsession:

1. Detroit got a Top 40 station.

2. We got cable TV.

I actually have these two events flip-flopped chronologically, as WHYT (96.3 FM) didn't sign on until September (after we'd had our cable box installed), but since we were already on the radio tip, this bears mentioning first. While the "Hot Hits" format was incredibly restrictive (even for Top 40) and seemingly Hell-bent on beating current songs into a bloody smear as soon as humanly possible, the far more upbeat-skewed music mix and production of WHYT instantly had my ear. While hearing the current #1-rated song once an hour on the hour (whether it was, say, Chicago's "Hard To Say I'm Sorry," Men At Work's "Who Can It Be Now" or John Cougar's "Jack And Diane") wasn't exactly what I was looking for in a music source, WHYT was at least energetic enough to keep my radio in occasional use, as by then I had found my true home in the same broadcast medium that infected me with the music bug in the first place.

Funnily enough, many friends of mine had cable TV months before this rapidly-spreading phenomenon made its way north of 12 Mile Road. I can't recall exactly when Paul's family acquired a cable box, but it was certainly no later than the spring of '82 that we started flipping around channels between D&D games and discovering what was out there.

It is nearly impossible now to convey just how gigantic a leap forward cable TV was at this point in time: until then, I had known only the three big network affiliates and a handful of clarity-impaired UHF channels. Skipping around the far-bigger selection of channels the cable brought to your fingertips was kind of like being locked overnight in a candy store (especially when it came to watching R-rated movies uncut and uncensored when the parents weren't looking). The options were mind-boggling: HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, CNN, ESPN (your one-stop source for "Australian Rules" Football), USA, Nickelodeon, The Weather Channel, and a low-rent, fly-by-night-looking operation called MTV.

In retrospect, I wish that I could claim a more "street" or "hip-friendly" entranceway into music as a full-time passion, as it gives me a vague sense of shame to admit that MTV was the primary catalyst that made music the central focus of my life forever after. This is largely due to the modern state of the channel, which seems more like a succession of increasingly vapid reality shows than a network driven by music. For those who aren't familiar with the way things once were, you'll have to believe when I tell you that things were once completely, wonderfully the other way around.

It wasn't the concept of MTV so much as the execution that I found so utterly intoxicating, especially at that point in the channel's evolution. In the middle of 1982, MTV was a completely unproven commodity that was madly scrambling for profitability and programming, and the fact that everyone involved was winging it as they went along made all the difference in the world in the channel's early underdog charm. With only a finite amount of videos available domestically (most American record companies considered these cheaply-fashioned clips as either an arty indulgence for a favored baby act or a last-ditch shot at promotion) and oceans of air time to fill with something, MTV gladly played just about any clip they could get their hands on from whatever source, be it major label, indie, or import. As a result, the breadth of artists in their rotation, based largely in mainstream-leaning rock, often extended into the realms of post-punk, New Wave, synthpop and ska -- nearly all of which was completely, joyously alien and exotic to my ears.

Radio schmadio: there were no mainstream stations anywhere in Detroit that were yet playing these previously unheard-of bands that were continually knocking me out of my chair as I watched, frequently enraptured, for hours on end. True, there were often stretches of time devoted to the blandly corporate likes of Toto ("Rosanna"), .38 Special ("Caught Up In You"), Kansas ("Play The Game Tonight"), Triumph ("Lay It On The Line"), and Aldo Nova ("Fantasy"), but this was more than worth the chance to be exposed to such acts as Thomas Dolby ("Europa & The Pirate Twins"), Devo ("Peek-A-Boo!"), Blancmange ("Living On The Ceiling"), ABC ("The Look Of Love"), Heaven 17 ("Penthouse & Pavement"), Duran Duran ("Hungry Like The Wolf"), The English Beat ("Save It For Later"), Pete Shelley ("Homosapien"), Missing Persons ("Words"), Gary Numan ("Cars"), Romeo Void ("Never Say Never"), Split Enz ("I Got You"), Jon And Vangelis ("Friends Of Mr. Cairo"), Yaz ("Don't Go"), Peter Gabriel ("Shock The Monkey"), The Fixx ("Red Skies"), Icehouse ("Hey Little Girl"), Bill Nelson ("Flaming Desire"), A Flock Of Seagulls ("I Ran"), Bow Wow Wow ("I Want Candy"), Ultravox ("Vienna"), Landscape ("Norman Bates"), Altered Images ("I Could Be Happy"), Kraftwerk ("The Model"), Visage ("The Damned Don't Cry"), The Buggles ("Video Killed The Radio Star"), Grace Jones ("Demolition Man"), XTC ("Senses Working Overtime"), Adam & The Ants ("Antmusic"), Depeche Mode ("Just Can't Get Enough"), Talk Talk ("Talk Talk"), and Wall Of Voodoo ("Mexican Radio").

The transformation was now complete: there was no turning back at this point. Much like Corey Haim's character Sam in the 1987 teen/vampire fest The Lost Boys, the mere thought of life without MTV from 1982 - 88 was absolutely horrifying to me ... if not unthinkable. Indeed, too much was never enough.



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