Elegy for the Video Star
That eleven-year-old is still inside me, still searching for music she loved.
Hello, my buddies and beauties. Miss Dee Jay here. And.... we come to bury a friend.
On December 31, MTV stopped broadcasting music videos.
MTV - at least, the MTV I grew up with - is dead.
It had been dying for awhile. MTV discovered in the 1990s that developing their own television programming was more lucrative than broadcasting videos, and steadily moved toward developing their own shows; who would have thought that a silly game show like Remote Control would be MTV’s first death knell? Ultimately, though, it was streaming that killed the MTV star; there was no point in having a channel dedicated to music videos when people can just Youtube the thing.
I grew up in the 1980s; I remember my older cousins introducing me to MTV in the summer of 1986, and being absolutely enraptured. It changed how I thought about music, and it changed how I experienced music. The format we think of as the music video had taken a cue from earlier forms of visually-enhanced music, that of musical theater and its antecedent, opera; in order to convey a story or a set of emotions within the typical four-minute span of a song, everything was “turned up to 11”; the emotions, the sounds, the colors, the fashions, even the hair.
The music of the 80s, like the music of opera, was not particularly subtle. And I ate it up, watching it religiously when I could. In the radio tradition of the time, I even used a VCR to record the music videos of songs I liked, keeping songs I particularly enjoyed.
The 1980s were my generation; it was the time of my childhood. One thing I am finding of critical import as I have rebuilt myself is regaining pieces of that childhood I lost, pieces of the childhood I threw away in my fear and despair.
Before we proceed, we must be cautious. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing; anyone who says anything about how things were “great” and could be “great again” should be taken with a huge amount of skepticism. This especially applies to the 1980s, which saw the rise of a malignant bigoted conservative proto-religious-right faux-populism “greed is good” movement that decades later would metastasize into MAGA. Even nostalgia about music needs to be taken with care; to reference opera again, it is impossible to reference Richard Wagner’s works without mentioning Wagner’s virulent German nationalism and anti-semitism, nor how these malignant works shaped late 19th and early 20th century German culture and society. (Put simply, FUCK Wagner, and the valkyrie he rode in on. While we’re at it, fuck Lee Greenwood, his hypocritical patriotism, and his hypocritical religious belief, too.)
That said, each older trans person, each of us that didn’t have the childhood we wanted, the childhood we could have had, ultimately has to dive into that nostalgia to reconcile with that childhood. Maybe it’s the toys we weren’t allowed to play with. Maybe it’s the outfit we wanted but could never have. And maybe it's the music we weren't allowed to like. We all have to come to some sort of understanding with what might have been, and figure out what we can have again.
I’ve been doing this some lately. To be honest, it is one of the reasons I write this blog, to both discover music that may have been denied me, and rediscover music I’d set aside when I was young. Pre-teens aren’t so concerned about artistic purity or experimentation, and aren’t generally concerned about how “corporate” or how much of a “sellout” a piece of music is; until their siblings and peers start trying to define what’s “cool” and what isn’t, they don’t even care about that. They just care about what sounds good to them.
So… what song is the exemplar of this MTV era to me? What song could I love so much that I would reference it on the death of this institution? What song could best represent - for me, anyway - this dying gasp of 1980s greatness? A song that, for adult-me, is a statement about transmisogyny - about not being respected for what I’ve done, what I’ve accomplished. A song that originally was written as a statement about the death of another venue for music, that being the closing of some live-music clubs in early 1980s Los Angeles. A song that I loved in my youth, later forswore as it stopped being “cool”, but that I’ve come to rediscover and appreciate, as I grasp for things from my childhood that gave me joy. And also, strangely, a song that is so symbolically 1980s with all its contradictions, being both an anti-capitalist statement from an anti-capitalist band while being so blatantly corporate that it is despised to this day, named as the “The Worst Song of the 80s” by Rolling Stone, the “Worst Song of All Time” by Blender, by GQ, and by the A.V. Club. Even one of its lead singers called it the “worst of all time”! And, for the piece de resistance, nowadays, it's most commonly heard in Northern toilet paper commercials: "We quilt this city on a comfy roll....."
That’s right, my buddies and beauties… 11-year-old me absolutely loved the band Starship - and that included “We Built This City”.
"We Built This City" by Starship, from their 1985 album Knee Deep In The Hoopla. Song written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf. Just going to say it: to a trans girl like myself who likes her raven-black hair, Grace Slick was goals.
Looking at the details, this was a mess. Bernie Taupin and Martin Page had initially written a somewhat dark and brooding song to mourn the death of the club scene in Los Angeles, and how this was removing venues for up-and-coming bands to break through and develop. So, anti-capitalist; anti-establishment. Starship was the spiritual successor to Jefferson Airplane, the avant-garde psychedelic band that had electrified audiences at Monterey Pop and at Woodstock. So, also, anti-capitalist, anti-establishment. And yet… somewhere in between songwriters, band, producer, sound engineer, and record label, enshittification happened, turning out one of the most corporate songs ever to grace the radio waves.
No wonder co-lead singer Grace Slick, the remaining band member from those Airplane days, hated it so much; she was the one who called it the “worst of all time”. But... it is perhaps the most appropriate song we could have for this elegy, for the death of MTV: a song written to mourn the closing of music by corporate interests, itself twisted by those same corporate interests into something far more commercial, far different from what was intended.
I’m not going to defend my love of the song. The fifty-something me that listens to the song now hears the pain of transmisogyny, of accomplishment forgotten in the amnesia of transition. ("Don't you remember, we built this city...). That said, it’s hard to not call that sophistry, justification for liking a bad song. In the end, I'm really just an old woman trying to speak to the little girl within, the one who never got to live, who found her joys wherever she could, and somehow managed to grow up to become me.
In the wibbly-wobbly world of space-time, there’s a sad eleven-year-old child who’s glued to the television watching her MTV, and wearing out her cassette tape of Knee Deep In The Hoopla. That eleven-year-old is still inside me, still searching for the music she loved, music that captivated her once upon a time… and hopefully, by finding that music, she can get a small part of her life back.
And, whatever that eleven-year-old inside of you is doing, maybe it's time to do her a solid - and play a few tunes for her, too.
