https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwuy4hHO3YQ
MTV, obviously, set the precedent here back in August 1981: if you're going to present a bunch of unrelated songs to an invisible public with no clear path to accomplishing anything, start with "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. It's structured superbly for an introductory song: first the gleaming, reverberating washes of synthesizer. Then the soft but sprightly electric piano and the sad vocals, distorted over cheap transmission; the cooing female "Oh, uh oh" hook; the thumping quarter-note drum that starts 24 seconds in, and the first quick tease of that switched-on-Bach style of sprightly keyboard two seconds later.
The second verse builds further momentum and juggles more distractions, but maintains the air of regret: "They took the credit for your second symphony/ re-written by machine and new technology/ and now I understand the problems that you see". Only after more "Oh, uh ohs" does the chorus kick in at 1:18, and now the rhythms have acquired some syncopation and modest complexity.
The chorus is an interesting choice, because it has the sunny yet taunting cadence of a commercial jingle. "Video killed the radio star" is sung like a boast, even as "Pictures came and broke your heart/ We can't rewind, we've gone too far" still sound apologetic. Jingles, of course, depend on inevitability: if you start to think that "I can buy this invention" doesn't mean "I ought to buy this invention", that it might mean "I should ponder the social desirability of this invention as a democratic citizen with indirect governmental obligations" -- well, the ad fails, right? Can't have that. Can't rewind, la la la. (Which you can't! Who has Video Tape Recorders anymore? Landfills can rewind. They have hands, or at least old gloves.)
MTV embraced the boast aspect. It worked for them. Starting with a desperately small catalog of usable videos (and temporarily making stars of random bands like Blotto that just happened to be part of that collection), the network ended up transforming how music was marketed, and its leaders, employees, and music stars ended up filling Rob Tannenbaum's entertaining oral history I Want My MTV with expensive-sounding sexcapades, cocaine jags, and tales of ambitious or over-ambitious video set ideas. I know nothing about Trevor Horn's, Geoff Downes's, or Bruce Woolley's personal lives, but nothing else about the Buggles' music sounded like a prelude to decadence. That chorus, though: that's got swagger.
I will note that when I showed this video to my 10- and 8-year-old boys, their reaction to the chorus/ title was "No". They can't remember a music world without video, but sometimes their mom drives them places, so they know radio stars are alive and well. (In their experience, radio stars mostly seem to have listened a lot to Alice in Chains at an impressionable age.) Vinyl records are still being sold. Classical music is still being composed and its new masterpieces being debated. Radio plays were killed off by television, then brought back by the podcast (and before that, by Doctor Who fans trying to keep its old TV stars in regular employment while the British show was off the air).
There's still an estimated 10,000 blacksmiths in the United States, for that matter, though few of them work the trade full-time. The cultural past doesn't die. It becomes a specialty item, that's all, waiting for its triumphant return.
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