For those of us of a certain age, it still feels both sad and inexplicable that MTV—a channel that literally used to be called “Music Television”—stopped, y’know, playing music, on television. Sadly, the innocent days when MTV did just play music are never coming back—and while it’s not like we needed further confirmation of this, we got it anyway on New Year’s Eve with the closure of MTV’s remaining music channels in the UK, Australia, and a bunch of other countries.
Still, it’s not all bad news for MTV nostalgics. This week also saw the launch of a site called MTV Rewind, which aggregates MTV music videos from YouTube in a bid to recreate the experience of MTV’s pre-reality TV era.
You might argue that you could get a similar experience by just heading to YouTube and typing “MTV music” into the search bar, selecting a video, and letting the site’s autoplay feature do its thing. Anyone who has actually done this, however, will know that sooner or later, YouTube will start steering itself away from what you’ve asked it to play and toward what it thinks you like. In my case, no matter where I start, YouTube’s algorithmic carcinization will eventually deliver me to Radiohead’s “In the Basement” video—which, to be clear, is absolutely fantastic, but is also something I’ve already watched a gazillion times.
MTV Rewind’s videos, by contrast, are drawn at random, with no algorithmic input. This obviously has the potential for frustration—no, I do not want to watch a video by Sublime, ever—but also makes for a more faithful recreation of the experience of sitting in front of the TV circa 1989. Using the site also neatly circumvents YouTube’s ongoing ad barrage, which is a pleasant bonus.
The site’s developer, who goes by the name Flexasaurus Rex, has posted a series of updates on Farcaster, explaining that they started building the site last weekend to recreate what they call “a cultural institution that changed music, fashion, and youth culture.” Some 48 hours later, they were done: “I’m broke, exhausted, and honestly feeling like shit, but thousands are using [the site].”
The next day, perhaps having re-upped on coffee, the developer was back online, proclaiming MTV Rewind to be “punk rock as fuck … a middle finger to algorithmic manipulation, ad-driven content, engagement optimization, data extraction and corporate streaming monopolies.”
There’s a certain irony to this. While, in its heyday, MTV was certainly a cultural institution, it was also endlessly derided—critics decried it for representing corporate homogenisation of culture, and shortly after its launch, David Bowie famously denounced its lack of black artists. (The most viewed YouTube clip of that interview, by the way, is on … MTV News’s channel.) The whole thing brings to mind Harvey Dent’s observation that you die a hero or live long enough to become a villain; in MTV’s case, sticking around even longer seems to have brought it full circle into a state of nostalgic heroism.
As of publication, MTV Rewind pulls from a database of 33,478 videos, which it divides into 10 channels. These include videos sorted by decade, along with those from MTV Unplugged, Headbangers’ Ball, and Yo! MTV Raps. (The latter is less corny than its name makes it sound, kids.) Considering the real-life experience of watching MTV meant seeing a rotation of maybe 30 videos throughout the day, MTV Rewind has its perks.
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