How reality finally caught up with MTV

In India, the M(usic) had gone out of MTV long ago. Now, the channel is shuttering its music channels in Europe. But its VJs , who had made TV cool, have banded together and are now making everyday life look cool, one reel at a time


Political revolutions happen on the streets, often marked by violence and chaos. Cultural revolutions are quieter, even surreptitious. MTV is the perfect example. The music channel was among the biggest cultural ‘influencers’ of the modern world much before Gen Z appropriated the word. And many of us didn’t even notice it.
Born in Aug 1981, MTV fundamentally changed the way the global young consumed popular music. The first music video televised on the channel, “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles, was a cheeky declaration of intent.

Till then, songs were auditory. Now, they morphed into the audio-visual. This was also the time when rhythm-driven disco had taken hold of the club and party scene in the West. A hot-stepping John Travolta, with the help of the Bee Gees, had seduced the only-toowilling in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). MTV was perfectly poised to cash in on the perfect storm of opportunity. But the channel was struggling to find a larger, more diverse demographic.

Enter Michael Jackson ’s Thriller. The album released in 1982 had recorded good sales, but it was nowhere close to becoming a monster success. But the music videos of its songs — Billie Jean, Beat It and, more specifically, title track Thriller (released in 1983) — took record sales to ginormous levels. Jackson and MTV synergised each other like nothing before or after. “Thriller sealed MTV’s reputation as a new cultural force…” Phile Hebblethwaite wrote in The Guardian in 2013. Equally importantly, it also widened the channel’s demographic reach and advertising appeal, making it a major success.

Overall, MTV created the template of the singing-dancing star, shifted public tastes towards a more rhythm-oriented music and eye candy pop stars (think Duran Duran) and became the go-to channel for the 13 plus23 minus defining their idea of cool. Which translated into what outfit to wear and which condoms to use, spawning a parallel multi-billion-dollar consumer industry. MTV was also Money TV.

By 1987, MTV even tailored news the way the young allegedly wanted it. A 2023 NYT article recalled how President Bill Clinton’s response to a town hall query put ‘MTV News’ under the spotlight in 1994. The existential question was: “‘Boxers or briefs?’ ‘Usually briefs’, Mr Clinton responded to a room full of giggles.” MTV had seamlessly constructed pop politics.

MTV had impacted India long before the channel came to India. In the 1980s, India was a single-television channel country even though the country briefly sampled the new world of music videos, courtesy DD every week. But this was also the video cassette recorder age, when pirated tapes of foreign films and music videos were readily available countrywide. If you saw shades of Jackson’s moonwalk in a Mithun or Govinda move, you didn’t need to think twice how the song found its way to Bollywood. Thousands even in small-town India were already doing the same.

In 1991, India opened its economy and the skies. Satellite TV brought in soaps such as ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ bringing the forbidden to upwardly mobile middle-class homes. The urban young found a channel that spoke to — not at them — when MTV India happened in 1996, two years after Channel V, another channel of the same variety. The channels gave them vitality and identity. As in the West, the video jockeys were as pivotal as the music. The VJs — their relaxed flounce, their cool couture, their zany humour — seemed hipper than the Bollywood stars in the newly globalised universe. These channels seldom commanded high TRPs but they ranked high as influencers of the “with-it” as well as the “wannabe” urban young.

Both Channel V and MTV eventually went desi, hoping to reach out to a larger audience, enabling the rise of local music talent in Indi-Pop (Silk Route, Alisha Chinoy, Lucky Ali, to name a few) and Bhangra pop (Daler Mehndi). But the times and the tech were a-changin’. Rampant online and offline music piracy caused the fall of record companies, forcing others associated with music to change tracks. Now lifestyle took frontstage.

MTV recast itself with reality shows: the intense Roadies (2003) and the dating show, Splitsvilla (2008), to name two. Rannvijay Singha and Ayushsmann Khurana were two early winners of the show. And while these shows continue to enthuse a small section among the young and the restless, MTV ceased to inhabit the young’s cultural cosmos. As smartphones became an extension of the hand, the world got busy broadcasting itself; everyone making their own reels, short videos and video logs. In the new chaotically democratised world of entertainment, there was no space for an arbiter of hip. It was more than just a mid-life crisis. MTV was a great idea whose time had gone.