Recently MTV “opened” its video vaults online but I have to give it a big MEH.

I mean, it’s all good and fine if you’re at a computer and want to watch Dio’s “Rock N Roll Children” in all its cheesy goodness. But I’m more of a passive person. I want to turn on a channel and let it come to me. Entertain me dammit!

I grew up on music videos. It wasn’t just MTV, but I do remember the day it went on the air I probably watched 10 hours straight. Even the songs I didn’t like so much I stuck with because maybe I’d get lucky and see some video vixen prancing around in her underwear (hey, before the internet, porn wasn’t so easy to come by…you took what you could get!). MTV was great too in the fact that it meshed so many musical styles together that you got to hear what you wanted, all while being exposed to other genres. To go from Judas Priest to Haircut 100 to Huey Lewis always rattled my ADD brain, in a good way. It’s probably why I enjoy the shuffle mode on my iPod so much. Genres mashing together randomly are more telling than one might suspect.

But, before MTV there were options as well. Back when we had only 36 cable channels to choose from (selected from a box wired to the TV that doubled as a remote) videos were usually delivered via late night television.

I remember when Nickelodeon first hit the airwaves, it consisted mostly of pre-school shows imported from Quebec. But every night at 8PM, it played 3 hours of music videos in what must have been a precursor of the birth of MTV as a network. How I remember some of the songs they played over and over and over…”Computer Games” from Mi-Sex, “Walking On The Moon” from the Police, “Rio” from Michael Nesmith…

Around the same time period, the USA Network would air Night Flight every Friday and Saturday night. From 11PM until 2 or 3 in the morning, the show consisted of music videos, concerts and pop culture related movies and film shorts. I’m pretty sure this is where I first saw the movie Heavy Metal (heavily edited no doubt), which believe it or not, may have been my first introduction to Black Sabbath (“Mob Rules” still holds a special place in my metal heart). I also remember vividly seeing an early Sammy Hagar concert while I struggled to stay awake and take in this new medium. As the years went on, it eventually morphed into Up All Night and turned into a steaming pile (Rhonda Shear’s cleavage notwithstanding).

Locally, here in northern NJ, in the mid to late eighties we also had a UHF music video channel called U-68, which was spun off the Wometco Home Theater (an early HBO competitor that you didn’t require cable to receive). U-68 was great in that it played videos that got no airtime anywhere else. I remember they would play this clip from Japanese hard rockers EZO over and over. I can’t remember the song anymore and about all I do remember was a bunch of Kiss wanna-be’s on a train track. How’s that for irrelevant details? It was also just about the only place to see bands like Enuff Z’nuff or Danger Danger. U-68 was total Jersey: brash, loud and lots of hair.

Then, of course, there was Friday Night Videos, which was basically MTV for people who didn’t have cable. I gotta be honest, since we had MTV, I never really watched the show.

Nowadays there seems to be more avenues than ever before for music videos so I’m not going to sit here and rail on MTV for not playing them. I am thankful on my FIOS cable setup we have about 10 channels that do play a healthy stock of videos for those fleeting moments when I want to hear a song or two without getting a little crazy (and without having to boot up a computer, go online and search for it). I’ve become slightly addicted to VH-1 Classic, but with each day unfortunately it resembles its parent channel just a little more. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before it airs endless repeats of Rock Of Money.

But, there’s no buzz anymore. Nothing stands out. For a society as visually addicted as we seem to be, it surprises me. Does it speak of the quality or just the overwhelming amount of information at hand?