Looking back on the MTV phenomenon, I’d have to say that MTV did to the music industry what texting and email did to the way we communicate with other.

We stopped writing letters, sending postcards some of us stopped speaking in complete sentences. What we had to say was  became a vehicle for quips or emojiis that we sent by computer, later by phone

Music became the backdrop for it’s visual counterpart,

Not that MTV was all bad, but for me if I hated a video, I hated the song. It was 20 odd years before I liked John Mellencamp because it took that long to not see those awful videos when his songs came on.

When I think back on how important- or trendy it became to design songs as a back track for videos I think of the album Freeze Frame by the J Geils Band.

The lyrics painted one frame after another for you to reflect upon and because of this you  didn’t need a tv screen to help you ‘see the music’.

It’s funny to think that I would connect an album that didn’t need outside help to make it “visual  as a soundtrack to the ‘video music generation”, but I do.