Curatorial Corner – “Suddenly we were in the short-film business” : The End of an Era at MTV

When MTV signs off on its 24/7 music-only channels for the last time today, it will mark more than the end of a few television stations. It will close the door on a cultural experiment that fundamentally changed how Americans discovered music, understood artists, and imagined the relationship between sound and image. For a generation—and then some—MTV wasn’t just where you watched music. It was where music happened.

Launched in 1981 with the prophetic declaration “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” MTV arrived at a moment when the music industry was already powerful but visually undefined. Before MTV, artists were heard far more often than they were seen. Album covers, publicity photos, and the occasional television appearance filled in the gaps. If you were lucky, you might see your favorite artists in concert. MTV collapsed those distances. Songs suddenly came with faces, fashions, narratives, and attitudes, and success increasingly depended not just on how an artist sounded, but on how they looked, moved, and told stories on screen.

Over the decades, MTV’s role evolved—from jukebox to tastemaker to reality television pioneer—but its early impact was seismic. It helped create global superstars, accelerated trends, and rewired the economics of the record business. Some artists embraced the new visual language instinctively; others resisted it, adapted to it, or reshaped it on their own terms.

New Jerseyans Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi, emerging from similar rock traditions but navigating MTV in slightly different ways, offer two revealing examples of how artists negotiated this new terrain.

Springsteen arrived at MTV already established as a serious album artist, deeply rooted in live performance and storytelling. His first albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle had debuted in 1973; 1975’s Born to Run made him world famous. Early on, his relationship with the new music channel was cautious, even uneasy. But as he recalls in his autobiography, Born to Run, by 1984, he had to feed the beast:

“…MTV had arrived, was potent, pragmatic, and demanded tribute. Suddenly we were in the short-film business and new skills would be needed. Videos happen fast: an afternoon, a day, then it’s in the hands of the director and there’s no going back.

It’s a medium that’s more dependent on collaboration than record making, and a lot of money can be burned in a short time. The finished product can only be indirectly controlled by the recording artist. To do it well, you need a team of directors, editors, art directors, stylists, who get what you’re about and can help you translate that to the screen. It had taken me 15 years to put together a record production team that could do that for me; now I’d have to raise a complete film team in 15 minutes. Still the times and ambition demanded it…

So here I am…and standing in front of me is Brian De Palma a friend of Jon [Landau]’s. The director of The Untouchables, Scarface, and many other great films, is here to give us a leg up on ‘Dancing in the Dark.’ We had a false start a week or two previous with another director, so Brian’s come to make sure justice is done to what will turn out to be my greatest hit.

He introduces me to a pixie-ish, dazzlingly blue-eyed young girl in a freshly minted ‘Born in the USA’ shirt, deposits her at the front of the stage and says, ‘At the end of the song, pull her up on stage and dance with her.’ He’s the director. So a baby-child Courtney Cox takes her queue, while I white-man boogaloo and daddy shuffle my way to the number two spot on the Billboard charts. Until Brian told me later he’d chosen her from a casting call in New York City, I thought she was a fan!

We would make many videos in the future—I’d even come to enjoy them—but none would ever elicit the same knee-slapping guffaws and righteous rolling laughter from my kids as me doing my Jersey James Brown in ‘Dancing in the Dark.’