Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #296: Biography: I Want My MTV (2019).

 

On 1 August, 1981, the Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star beamed out onto TV screens across the US, and Music Television, the network that came to define Generation X, was born. The 2019 documentary Biography: I Want My MTV, from directors Tyler Measom and Patrick Waldrop, traces MTV's history from its difficult creation to its transformation of the music industry, then to its shift in the 1990s to scripted and reality programming.

This is a pretty superficial documentary but that's appropriate because MTV was meant all along to be superficial. It does, however, demonstrate very illuminatingly how MTV revolutionised the music industry with the increasing significance of music videos as an art form and television with, for better or worse, the advent of the reality genre and rival music networks like VH1. It also deals quite frankly with the issues of inclusivity and equality the network has faced, particularly in its early years when artists like Rick James publicly called it out for playing too few artists of colour and for how heavily women were objectified in many hard rock videos. (In fairness to them, the second video played on MTV was Pat Benatar's You Better Run.) Once the '90s rolled around, the spike in competition as well as changing cultural trends inspired MTV brass to dabble in non-music programming with the show The Real World, in whose wake shows like Beavis and Butthead, Jackass, Punk'd and (my personal favourite) Teen Wolf followed, and the documentary ends with how music consumption and music videos have gone from MTV to YouTube, suggesting that while MTV may be on the wane, it still had quite its reign as a musical and cultural behemoth.

Pop culture documentaries can be very hagiographic, but this one isn't. Measom and Waldrop evidently are passionate about their subject and its history but here they still strive to capture that history's essence honestly, as I discussed above. Their goal, with which they of course use archive footage and interviews with numerous former hosts and music artists, is ultimately to trace MTV's trajectory and reveal its cultural and artistic legacy. In doing that, they also manage to remind the viewer how impermanence works to ensure all trends and institutions come and go, but the joy and inspiration they generate, linger nonetheless. Biography: I Want My MTV does its iconic subject genuine justice.