Happy (?) birthday....

No matter which way I turned this morning, the 1980s kept hitting me in the face, which is not in and of itself a bad thing. During that decade I was definitely younger, in better physical shape, weighed at least fifty pounds less, fewer graying hairs. On the way to work I passed a woman whose hair was so tall, teased, and hair sprayed that she looked like they had just removed her from a time capsule buried in 1984. This comes on top of today being the twenty-fifth birthday for MTV. To celebrate this apparent “historic” day, one of the radio stations in Atlanta is only playing songs that were featured in videos from on MTVs first day of broadcasting. What’s more, VH1 Classic is running all the videos that were featured on that first day.

I watched about an hours worth of the programming on VH1 Classic this morning. Many of the videos they showed I had never seen before. When MTV hit the airwaves in 1981, I was living in the Augusta area and the crappy cable service there didn’t carry the channel. To give an idea of just how crappy the cable service was, just the mere mention of the word lightning would cause the cable to go out anywhere from a couple of hours (if you were lucky) to a few days. So I got to miss many of the videos that were run during MTV s first year of operation.

It was very interesting watching some of those videos as I had no idea that an accompanying video had ever been made with some of those songs. For instance, I had never seen the video for the Ramones’ “Do You Remember Rock N’ Roll Radio” from their End of the Century album. It’s an average video for 1980 but odd watching it now knowing that 75% of the people in the band are now dead.

Which brings me to this video from the very early 80s from Cliff Richard for his song “We Don’t Talk Anymore.” This song brought back some horrible memories of being a teenager living in the Augusta area; the accompanying video would’ve been my coup de grace had I seen it. Perhaps not having MTV in 1981 was a good idea (not having it now is definitely a good idea). I’m guessing the cost for making this video was $12.50 and a reach-around. Still the only song I'm aware of that includes the lyric "she-e-e-e-p" in the backing vocals. Welcome to the 80s! Welcome to Hell!