35 minute read
ARE PERSONAL POLITICS FUELING THE FIRE?
from Inlander 07/29/2021
by The Inlander
Range Community Clinic traveled to parts of rural Eastern Washington to administer COVID-19 vaccinations, but demand for vaccinations is dwindling. CORI KOGAN/WSU PHOTO
COVID-19
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As vaccination rates lag in rural northeast Washington, health officials fear COVID ‘onslaught’
Sam Artzis is exhausted. As both an emergency room doctor and the public health officer in rural northeast Washington, he’s spent more than a year trying to convince people to take COVID-19 seriously.
But now more than ever, he fears there’s a “perfect storm” brewing that will devastate his community. In the Northeast Tri County Health District — where Artzis is health officer — just over one-third of people 16 and older have initiated vaccination. Yet the more contagious Delta variant has arrived as the dominant strain there, and people are attending large indoor gatherings more now that the state has lifted restrictions.
It’s a recipe for “the next onslaught” of preventable disease, death and economic fallout, he says.
“I’m past frustrated. I’m tired,” he says. “But what we need to do now is just focus on the next challenge and try to be as prepared as we can with the limited resources we have in the Tri County area.”
In Washington as a whole, more than 70 percent of people 16 and older have initiated vaccination for COVID-19. But that number doesn’t reflect the wide disparity between urban and rural vaccination rates, and health officials like Artzis are warning that rural Eastern Washington remains vulnerable to deadly COVID-19 outbreaks and possibly more shutdowns.
Efforts to vaccinate more people in rural areas, meanwhile, have stalled. The low vaccination rates in northeast Washington are no longer due to a lack of supplies or resources. It’s more often due to people’s politics and ideology — something that health officials say they have a difficult time overcoming.
“We believe we’ll continue to see cases long in excess of what heavily vaccinated communities will,” says Northeast Tri County Health District administrator Matt Schanz. “We’re going to be dealing with this much longer than others.”
BY WILSON CRISCIONE
ASK YOUR DOCTOR
While there’s a stark difference in vaccination rates between rural and urban areas in Washington, population density isn’t actually the best predictor of vaccination rates. A stronger correlation is with the presidential election: Counties with a higher share of votes for Donald Trump have had lower vaccination rates. ...continued on page 12
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Asked how to address this problem, Gov. Jay Inslee says the state has made “Herculean efforts” to share scientific information with the public about the vaccines, through social media, television and engagement from the medical community. He urges Washingtonians to “forget ideology” and to make decisions for their health.
“The most persuasive people about this are not politicians,” Inslee says. “They’re physicians and nurses and physician’s assistants.”
That reflects how the messaging on vaccines has shifted in rural areas. At first, rural health districts like Northeast Tri County were holding mobile and pop-up vaccine clinics, ensuring access for everyone who wanted a vaccine. The Range Community Clinic, a mobile clinic affiliated with Washington State University, has traveled to rural parts of Eastern Washington as well to vaccinate residents there.
Increasingly, however, there’s not enough demand to justify staffing mobile or pop-up clinics, Schanz says. If people haven’t got their vaccine by now, convenience or access is unlikely to change that.
“Now it’s down to a conversation with physicians and their patients,” he says.
Some doctors have had success with that. Thomas Boone, a doctor in Chewelah, says his practice has given out about 500 vaccine shots on its own — a high number for a town with a population of less than 3,000.
Boone says the sheer amount of misinformation he hears from patients can at times be difficult to overcome. He’s heard from patients that the vaccine is going to change their DNA, that it’s going to make them sterile, or that it will give them COVID — all verifiably false claims.
“We had one patient that said she didn’t get the vaccine because a friend got it, and after the friend got it her dog died,” Boone says.
Schanz says the health district is assessing subtle differences in vaccination rates within the health district. Ferry County, for example, is beating Stevens County in vaccinations by 10 percentage points, according to state data. Artzis says that may be because of an outbreak this spring in Republic — a town located in Ferry County. Ferry County saw a spike in vaccinations right afterward, but it didn’t last. He adds that Sam Artzis certain members of the medical community, like hospital leadership at Ferry County Hospital, have taken a proactive role in vaccine outreach.
Ultimately, people in northeast Washington aren’t going to trust the government, Artzis says. Artzis says he has much better luck persuading people to get a vaccine when he’s speaking as a patient’s doctor at Ferry County Hospital than he does as the public health officer.
“I tell them I’ve dealt with people who have had COVID-19, I’ve dealt with families that have had deaths, and the devastation it causes,” Artzis says. “I have not seen one person come in the hospital ill enough to be hospitalized that has been vaccinated. Everybody we put in the hospital who has died has not been vaccinated.”
Relying on medical providers to persuade patients only works, however, if the providers
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themselves believe in the vaccine. But in northeast Washington, Artzis says based on his conversations with health care leadership in the area, only about half of providers have taken the vaccine.
“I think that’s wrong. They’re not going to give their patients good information to make that decision to get vaccinated if they themselves have reservations, whether it’s political, religious, philosophical, or scientifically based,” Artzis says. “So yeah. I do not see, objectively, our numbers getting significantly better anytime soon.”
DEADLY CONSEQUENCES
Artzis considers himself an optimist.
The future he envisions for northeast Washington, however, is grim.
Without a significant uptick in vaccination rates, and without any statewide restrictions on indoor gatherings, the Delta variant will take off. It already has become the dominant strain in northeast Washington, making up 58 percent of cases since June 20, local data says. Yet concerts and community events will be held, with some people not following guidelines and attending even though they’re feeling sick, Artzis says.
As a result, COVID-19 hospitalizations in the area will keep increasing. The hospitals are struggling with capacity already, Artzis says. That’s only going to get worse.
“Come this fall, with hospitals not having capacity, knowing the Delta variant’s coming, knowing people have made decisions not to be vaccinated, it only is the most reasonable conclusion that we’re going to be in trouble,” Artzis says.
Artzis will see more and more COVID patients in the hospital. Many won’t show up until they’re severely sick, increasing their chances of dying.
The hospitals, unable to increase their staffing, might have to cancel elective surgeries. Patients seeking non-COVID health care will find it difficult to get the care they need. Cancer patients may have to wait for procedures. Patients with severe back issues won’t be able to get relief.
“There’s going to be an extended suffering period for those people as well,” Artzis says.
There won’t be enough staff to do contact tracing. More localized COVID-19 outbreaks may go undetected until it’s too late. Then, Artzis says, schools are going to open fully in-person. He anticipates controversy over whether teachers and students will have to wear masks or not. Without masks, the outbreak will worsen, he says.
Businesses will suffer. If the spread of COVID-19 is bad enough, Artzis worries there will need to be more restrictions placed on businesses again.
It won’t go over well.
“We’ve had a taste of the good life for a month, with people feeling normal again,” he says. “To tell people that we’re going to have to do this again, it’s going to be a real challenge. And we have great resistance to that — not just here, but in [Spokane] as well. It’s going to be ugly.”
Essentially, it’s the same scenario he feared last year, right when the pandemic arrived in Washington. Granted, it took longer than he expected for COVID-19 to make much of an impact in northeast Washington, but when it did, it was just like the outbreaks in urban centers.
This time, with vaccine rates as low as they are, rural Eastern Washington will get hit worse than the bigger cities.
“I hope that I’m wrong,” Artzis says. “I really hope that I’m wrong.” n
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NEWS | EDUCATION The Politics of Bullying
Researchers find LGBTQ+ students harassed at higher rate in counties that voted for Trump
BY NATE SANFORD
Anew study from Washington State University found that LGBTQ+ students in conservative-voting school districts experience higher levels of bullying and psychological distress than their peers in liberal areas.
Steven Hobaica, who recently graduated from WSU with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and co-authored the study, was motivated to research the issue because of his own experience growing up as a cisgender gay student in a conservative school district. He says many people intuitively know there’s a connection between conservatism and LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, but that there’s a lack of literature on the issue. By documenting the connection, he hopes to aid the development of policy that can better protect LGBTQ+ youth down the road.
“So that all kids are protected — no matter how they identify,” Hobaica says. To examine the connection between bullying and political beliefs, Hobaica and the other researchers compared data from the 2018 Washington State Healthy Youth Survey with how school districts voted in the 2016 presidential election. District-level data isn’t publicly available because of student privacy concerns, but even at the county level, the differences in bullying patterns are noticeable.
In Spokane County, which went for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, 41.3 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual 10th graders said they had been bullied at some point in the past 30 days, according to 2018 Healthy Youth Survey data. Only 18.7 percent of straight students said they had been bullied. In King County, which overwhelmingly voted for Hillary Clinton, 24.8 percent of gay, lesbian or bisexual 10th graders reported being bullied. For straight students the number was 13.84 percent.
“I think it’s hard to doubt that there is that connection,” says Paul Kwon, a professor of psychology at WSU who co-authored the study. “Trump said many things that were inflammatory towards the LGBTQ+ community, and worse, he advocated for a lot of policies at the federal level that were quite discriminatory.”
James Byrnes, who graduated from North Central High School this year, says he doesn’t think Trump’s election was the driving force behind the homophobic bullying he experienced, but that it did empower people who were already disposed to it.
“There were certainly a few kids who I knew were very avid in a lot of his ideas who probably would have had the same issues with me either way, but I feel like they felt like they had social leverage because of that,” Byrnes says.
Byrnes came out to his peers in his sophomore year. He was running on the cross-country team at the time and says he quickly
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noticed a paradigm shift among some of his teammates. It was subtle at first: Some kids would keep their distance on the field, avoid sharing locker rooms and make occasional homophobic remarks. It later evolved into more explicit bigotry. During one morning practice, Byrnes says a football player approached him in the locker room and told Byrnes he looked like the type of person who would go to prison on purpose and dress up like a woman so he could be easily raped.
Byrnes says he was haunted by the incident. He didn’t tell people because he shared classes with the football player and didn’t want to further complicate things.
“It’s behind me now,” Byrnes says. “I still think about it sometimes, but I’m glad to be out of that environment.”
Despite the negative experiences, Byrnes says his high school experience wasn’t all bad — teachers were generally supportive of LGBTQ+ students, and the school’s gay-straight alliance provided him with a welcoming environment.
Henry Seipp, who has been the adviser of the Shadle Park High School Gay-Straight Alliance for almost two decades, says that while bullying is still an issue, teachers and community members are now much more attentive and likely to intervene.
“The idea of a kid getting shoved in a locker because he’s gay and then everyone giving a high-five to the bro who just shoved him in a locker? Those days are long gone,” Seipp says.
One of Hobaica and Kwon’s major findings was that in districts where teachers regularly intervene, rates of bullying for LGBTQ+ students were almost identical to non-LGBTQ+ bullying rates. In conservative districts, teacher intervention is less frequent. Washington has state laws intended to prevent LGBTQ+ bullying in schools, but Kwon and Hobaica say districtlevel policy can vary wildly and that more state-level anti-bullying policies are needed.
Hobaica says such policy might include discussions with students and families at the start of the year, public signage to identify safe spaces, anti-bullying curricula, and intervention training for teachers. For future research, Hobaica says he’s interested in exploring how other variables like race intersect with bullying of LGBTQ+ students.
Kwon says the study isn’t meant to be an indictment of a particular political party.
“It doesn’t mean that somebody who is conservative is automatically in favor of discriminatory policies,” he says. “What I think it is is a wake-up call that no matter your political orientation, I think it makes sense to support human rights.” n
Researchers Steven Hobaica (left) and Paul Kwon
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Pat Benatar ruled the early MTV screen.
It Was a Blast
It’s obvious now, but when MTV first launched 40 years ago this summer, the idea was relatively novel that a musical artist would feel compelled to make mini-movie versions of their songs. That’s abundantly clear when you go back and watch the first couple of hours of videos that aired on Aug. 1, 1981, on the channel that soon revolutionized the music industry, for good or ill depending on your point of view (and probably your age). Clearly, based on those early videos, they launched a channel before most record labels or bands thought much about making a killer visual product. The production values on most of the early options? Pretty terrible. The playlist that first day? Maledominated save for Pat Benatar and the Pretenders, and almost oddly diverse because they had to play whatever videos they had access to, and there weren’t many yet.
The hosts? They were “VJs” because they were “video jockeys” compared to their radio counterpart disc jockeys, a generally amiable blend of fresh talent (Martha
Quinn was 22 and just out of college) and radio veterans like JJ Jackson and Mark Goodman. ...continued on next page
JULY 29, 2021 INLANDER 17
MTV’s playful, pliable logo made for great visuals between videos.
The channel had issues with inclusivity early on and became pretty formulaic in time before eventually abandoning music almost completely in favor of lifestyle shows, teen-oriented programming and reality dreck. But there’s also no denying the massive influence MTV had on kids’ music tastes. Suddenly teens in middle America were being exposed to the likes of androgynous Brits like Culture Club, cool club kids like Madonna and, eventually, boundary-pushing artists like Prince. While Top 40 radio was full of Styx and REO Speedwagon when MTV appeared, it soon shifted toward what MTV was delivering, and that’s not a bad thing. Because while it took MTV a couple years to start playing Black artists, Top 40 went from lots of shlock rock balladry to include synth-pop, soul and R&B, hard rock, and New Wave, all blended together by artists from around the world.
“One of the things about MTV that people don’t realize is that when it launched, it launched in very small markets. They were testing it out,” says Stephen Pitalo, a New York-based music and entertainment journalist and publisher of the new digital magazine Music Video Time Machine. “Aug. 1, 1981, is a big deal because that’s when MTV launched, but LA and New York didn’t get MTV until 1983. They were hitting these small markets, and the reason it grew so quickly is because these small markets like Tulsa, there was a huge spike in records they were selling that coincided with the music videos playing on MTV. When the record store in Tulsa is selling Duran Duran, there has to be some reason that it’s happening. “One of the things I love about this era is that it turned the pop charts into the most schizophrenic freefor-alls in the history of music. If you look at what was
on the charts in 1983, there’s so much going on. And the only thing they have in common is MTV — that their videos were playing.”
Ann Ciasullo, a Gonzaga University English professor whose research often delves into ’80s pop culture, remembers Spokane being one of those small towns where MTV had a huge impact on her and her friends. She was 11 when the channel debuted, giving her and her fouryears-older sister, Lori, ample opportunity to watch their favorites like Pat Benatar.
“My sister and I nagged our parents to get cable so we could get MTV,” Ciasullo says. “I know we had it in 1982 because I remember watching Journey’s concert, and this was a big neighborhood deal because my friends and I were all fans.
“One of the great things about MTV is, we were a small town at that point, and you’re seeing Adam and the Ants and David Bowie and a lot of weird stuff that you’re not going to see walking around the streets of downtown
Spokane.” Bob Gallagher opened his record store 4,000
Holes in Spokane in 1989, and he doesn’t recall any particular sales bumps driven by MTV as he was dealing more in rare collectibles than new artists at the time. But he concurs that the arrival of the channel opened his eyes to a lot of new music he might never have heard otherwise. “There’s no denying what MTV did for rock ’n’ roll,” Gallagher says. “It just opened the doors for so many bands that I never would have experienced. Even something as simple as Def Leppard. I might hear something on the radio but never pay much attention, until the ‘Photograph’ video, then my ears perked up a bit.”
GLORY DAYS None of the music business people expected MTV to work. As author Rob Tennanbaum notes in the 2011 book he co-authored with Craig Marks, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, the overwhelming response to creating a channel dedicated to music videos was that it “seemed like an asinine idea.” ...continued on page 20
That asinine idea would soon become a global phenomenon, including being the subject of a $525 million bidding war five years after its debut. That was real money in the mid-1980s! By 1987, MTV Europe launched the first of many global versions of the channel, but before all the worldwide pop cultural domination could get started, MTV had to survive its first unsure steps.
When the channel aired Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star” as its first video, the idea was basically to be FM radio, but on TV. The problem, though, is that the artists glutting America’s radio airwaves rarely had bothered to make a music video. That’s why the first months of MTV were so full of folks like Rod Stewart, Pat Benatar, Queen and live concert clips culled from ’70s-era bands.
MTV only had about 100 videos to rotate through when it launched, Tannenbaum writes, and the business plan was predicated on convincing record companies to make more videos, and to pay for making those videos, and then ultimately give those videos to MTV for free to put on the air. That seems crazy in retrospect, but damn if it didn’t work, especially after the record label suits saw those record sales increase in places like Spokane for bands getting a lot of play on MTV.
“A feature of early MTV was at the top of every hour, they’d show the logo and [play] the theme,” Ciasullo says. “And they’d tell you what was coming up. So you’d tune in to see, is this an hour I want to spend hanging out to see if they’re going to show a video I want? There was a lot of anticipation involved in it.
“We kind of grew up on TV, we had our own little TV room, and MTV was on all the time. All the time. I feel like we were just constantly waiting to see either a new video, or ‘When will we see Pat Benatar?’ or “When will we see Journey?’ I have a Polaroid picture of the TV with [Journey frontman] Steve Perry on it — that’s how much we were watching it.”
Pitalo was growing up in Biloxi, Mississippi, when MTV hit, but his experience was much the same as Ciasullo.
“We’re talking about junior high, high school and college, that was 1980 to 1990 for me, so I am the MTV generation,” Pitalo says. “It was not readily available in my region at first. And also it was an added channel, it wasn’t basic cable. You had to order it along with other channels that came along with it.”
Pitalo, who’s interviewed hundreds of artists and video directors from MTV’s heyday, notes that the form was a natural for some artists who used MTV to propel themselves into stardom, folks like Madonna and Culture
MTV hits the airwaves with the video for Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star.” Most of the country has no idea it’s happening.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video debuts, and MJ scares his “girlfriend” in the vid as well as lots of children at home years before accusations of pedophilia hit. The inaugural MTV Video Music Awards occurs, a celebration of the year’s best videos that continues to this day despite the channel rarely playing videos anymore. Video of the year goes to the Cars’ “You Might Think.” Madonna rolls around on the stage singing “Like A Virgin,” the first of a long history of memorable VMA performances. MTV airs the Live Aid concert raising money for Ethiopian famine victims, covering simultaneous concerts in London and Philadelphia and establishing MTV as the place in the music media business. The “Walk This Way” video debuts, featuring the unlikely combo of ’70s rockers Aerosmith and hip-hop pioneers Run-D.M.C., and gets constant play. Run-D.M.C. adds much needed cultural diversity to MTV, and Aerosmith launches a new (mostly terrible) phase in their career. Headbanger’s Ball debuts, helping dozens of hair-farming Sunset Strippers to land record deals and hit songs (mostly power ballads) before so-called “alternative” music wiped hair metal from the channel, at least for a while.
MTV launched with the music video for Buggles’ “Video Killed The Radio Star” in 1981.
Club and Billy Idol. “And it was also a weird testing ground right at that moment for who was going to graduate from the ’70s and become part of this big deal.” “There was just no way to know who was going to work and who was not,” Pitalo says. “Who would have guessed that singer/songwriters like Bruce
Springsteen and Billy Joel would thrive in this new era, then there were contemporaries of theirs that it just wouldn’t work out for.” 4,000 Holes’ Gallagher recalls the cheesy special effects of early Tom Petty videos, even as the classic rocker later made more memorable clips. And though he wasn’t enamored with all the shiny new acts on the channel, he wasn’t immune to MTV’s charms.
“It was probably the beginning of an almost video game-like era, when we started sitting in front of this screen mindlessly for hours,” he says. “That was really the first time I remember sitting down and watching, well, nothing really. Just one video after another.” NOT SO QUIET ON THE SET
MTV worked out just fine for artists across virtually every genre you can think of for most of the ’80s. As Tannenbaum writes in I Want My MTV, the channel “could make stars out of Brits in eyeliner, rappers in genie pants, permed Jersey boys, even choreographers with weak singing voices.” Readers of the MTV Generation probably know exactly who he’s talking about in each of those categories.
Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video for the title track of his second solo album was a cultural phenomenon and helped open doors for other Black artists who’d been largely ignored in the early days of the channel. Prince, Madonna and Bruce Springsteen, as well as the slew of artists known as the “Second British Invasion” (including Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Spandau Ballet, etc.), all saw their popularity soar as MTV expanded across the United States. Within a couple years of MTV’s launch, musicians were pretty much expected to make videos to accompany their new songs. Some embraced this new aspect of the music business, while others (notably Metallica for several early albums) used their refusal to make a video as a badge of “cool.”
Richard Marx’s self-titled debut arrived in 1987, and the pop-rocker tells the Inlander the effect of MTV on his career was “massive, really life-changing.” He recalls that his first single, “Don’t Mean Nothing,” was being pushed by his record label primarily to rock radio. It was a rock
song, after all, and three Eagles performed on the track, so rock radio was a natural place. Pop radio, not so much. Then, Marx says, MTV decided to air the video and declared it a “hip clip of the week,” which meant “Don’t Mean Nothing” would be played seven times a day, for seven straight days. “I remember being at 7-Eleven on Monday, and nobody even looking twice at me,” Marx says. “And then the next day going somewhere and having a crowd of people following me and coming up to me and asking for my autograph. Like, literally overnight, ‘Holy shit, I can’t believe this is happening!’” And it blew up from there. “MTV was incredibly helpful. I was giving them what they liked to play, and they were helping me sell records. It was a huge, huge component to my success.” Of course, just because they helped Marx doesn’t mean he enjoyed the process. He understood making videos was part of his job, a “really important component to keeping this train moving,” but the actual process of making them? “I absolutely hated it,” Marx says. “The actual conceptualizing, and particularly being in them, was never something I enjoyed. I hated it. It was a lot of standing around waiting, and sitting in a trailer waiting for them to light something. I didn’t have the patience for it. Every time it was time for a new video, I’d go, ‘Motherf---er, I f---ing hate this!’”
For hip-hop group Cypress Hill, MTV’s embrace of rap music and hip-hop culture toward the end of the ’80s was instrumental in connecting the band to an audience outside their Los Angeles home base. The pioneering Yo! MTV Raps showcase for hip-hop videos started on MTV in 1988 just as Cypress Hill landed a record deal. Their first single and video didn’t make much noise, but when their breakthrough “How I Could Just Kill A Man” started getting airplay, their label rushed them off tour to New York City to film a video as quickly as possible. ...continued on next page
Yo! MTV Raps debuts, marking the first time hip-hop had a dedicated space on the network.
MTV Unplugged debuts, and suddenly the charts were filled with acoustic versions of songs by unexpected artists ranging from Poison to LL Cool J and from Nirvana to Jay-Z. The Real World debuts, throwing a bunch of “artists” into a New York City loft and filming the results. Upside? Helps create reality TV (if you’re into that sort of thing). Downside? The Real World quickly devolves into a show on which folks just party instead of “getting real.” Total Request Live, aka TRL, debuts, and Disney-pop and boy bands soon take over the world thanks to the daily votes and crazed live audiences of teenagers. Carson Daly becomes a star despite being, as Jimmy Fallon famously portrayed on SNL, a “massive tool.” Jackass takes a bunch of boneheaded buddies willing to cause each other enormous pain to superstardom. Several awful Johnny Knoxville movies follow, because acting isn’t the same as having things shoved up your rectum. The Osbournes debuts, showing bat-munching metalhead Ozzy Osbourne at home with his wife and kids. Decades of celebrity reality series follow. Yay?
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The video helped Cypress Hill explode and start one of the more successful and long-running careers in the genre, but cofounder Sen Dog told the Inlander the “Kill A Man” video started a lot of confusion about the group because of its New York setting. For years they had to explain to people they were actually an LA crew. Even so, he credits MTV and videos for helping launch the group, and says he always enjoyed the process more than Marx did. Given Cypress Hill’s predilection for massive amounts of weed, that’s not a shock.
“Videos were always fun; you get a chance to hang out with your boys all day long,” Sen Dog says. “Film, smoke some herb, drink some beer, eat some good food and, you know, film a video. You get to jam your song all day long. It was fun for me; it wasn’t a thing like I felt like I was working.
“When our first video, ‘The Phunky Feel One,’ came out and they put it on Yo! MTV Raps, man, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I just kept looking at myself the whole way through. The first time I saw it, I kept looking at me. Later on you watch the whole video because you get over the fact your whole entity is on MTV Raps, and you look at when they played you in the show, who they played before and after, and all that.” REALITY KILLED THE VIDEO STAR
MTV still exists, but if you go turn it on right now, it’s likely just another episode of Rob Dyrdek’s Ridiculousness or Catfish: The TV Show. It’s been decades since music videos were the main ingredient on MTV, despite those initials allegedly meaning “music television.”
Author Tannenbaum considers 1981 to 1992 to be MTV’s “golden era,” and that end date coincides with the debut of MTV’s The Real World, the first of many reality shows to take
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Nailen is the managing editor of the Inlander and oversees the paper’s cultural coverage. He turned 10 two days before MTV hit the airwaves, and spent the next decade or so consumed by obsessive viewing of Headbanger’s Ball, 120 Minutes and Yo! MTV Raps. He can be reached at dann@inlander.com.
Catfish: The TV Show is one of the “reality” shows filling MTV since its golden years ended.
over the channel, and the first major move away from playing music videos.
Gonzaga professor Ciasullo recalls MTV losing its way even earlier. First the emphasis moved from the creative videos delivered by stylish, androgynous British bands to more stage performances by hard rock acts, accompanied by a side of serious misogyny.
“There’s a major shift in MTV’s programming in the mid- to late ’80s toward more metal, and those videos are just, frankly, a lot less interesting,” Ciasullo says. “I remember kind of wrapping up with MTV around my first year of college. At that point, they just weren’t showing videos as often.”
Pitalo reveres MTV’s golden age for its creativity in both the music and filmmaking, noting that several Hollywood heavyweights like David Fincher (working with Rick Springfield) and Michael Bay (working with Divinyls) got their starts in music videos.
“The music video directors I’ve talked to, one of the things they said over and over was that the early period was just such a sweet spot,” Pitalo says. “The common opinion was, ‘We never had enough money and we never had enough time, but I never had more fun and I never enjoyed my career more than when I was doing that.’”
As MTV devolved into lifestyle programming and music videos were left aside in the 40 years since the channel debuted, Pitalo thinks we’ve lost more than just an entertaining outlet.
“We live in a very unfortunately on-demand society when it comes to media,” Pitalo says. “And if it’s very easy to get, there’s that part of us that thinks that it has less value.
“You used to have to watch MTV, and wait. You had to wait for the thing you wanted to see. And you might not get to see it! And you have the choice of everything now. And you know what? The choice of everything now has not made it better. It has not made any form of media better.”
MTV lost its way when it decided to focus more on the television than the music, Pitalo says, and while he’s depressed by how “there’s no variety on the pop charts anymore,” he does get some retrofied joy when he VJs dance parties in New York, spinning videos from MTV’s better days.
“Basically, I’m a DJ but I’m playing videos on giant screens, and I stick to the ’80s and ’90s,” Pitalo says. “People come out, they want to dance. And the young, young kids who love the ’80s and ’90s don’t love it because it’s nostalgia. They love it because of what it is. Then there’s people who will come out who are my age or a little younger, that are like, ‘I love this, I haven’t seen these for so long.’
“When I’m doing a gig, and I’m mixing Toni Basil’s ‘Hey Mickey’ with Outkast’s ‘Hey Ya!’ and they totally embrace it, I know there’s hope.” n
SEVEN TO START
A professional VJ and music video historian offers early MTV videos you should look for online right now
BY STEPHEN PITALO
Early MTV videos were memorable for reasons good and bad. Here are some of the earliest clips to make a mark:
KATE BUSH “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” (1977) *
Way before Bjork was the poster girl for WTF videos, Kate Bush flew the flag for womanly weirdness on MTV. Director Keith MacMillan captured this hypnotic wide-eyed pixie dance that enraptured many and confused others. Revered in the United Kingdom but seldom charting in the U.S., she reached heavy MTV rotation with “Running Up That Hill” in 1985.
PRETENDERS “MESSAGE OF LOVE” (1981) *
Chrissie Hynde’s tightest tune feels both combative and fun in this simple performance clip with bandmates all facing each other. It’s a great peek into the Pretenders’ dynamic at the moment, knowing now that both Pete Farndon and James Honeyman-Scott would be dead by 1983.
PETER GABRIEL “SHOCK THE MONKEY” (1982)
Director Brian Grant went full-Gabriel on this video, using the song’s funky synth riff to set up a paranoid corporate-versus-shaman fever dream, featuring little people in business suits, Peter running away from no one through a swamp, and sentient office equipment. In short, a masterpiece.
ALDO NOVA “FANTASY” (1982)
In a 1-minute-27-second Terminator-like intro, Nova jumps off a helicopter, grabs a laser-shooting guitar from a nerd and blasts his way into his own concert. A band performance and quick-edit denouement are equal parts power and confusion, with Nova’s leopard-print jumpsuit serving as wardrobe inspiration to thirsty MILFs for decades.
ROBERT PLANT “IN THE MOOD” (1983)
The voice of Zeppelin delivered one of his better singles, anchored by Phil Collins’ sharp drum track, which results in a head-scratching but truly memorable jaunt. Don’t miss the lemon joke, the inexplicable breakdancers and the tossed-in dove in this low-budget gem.
GOLDEN EARRING “TWILIGHT ZONE” (1984)
Dutch filmmaker Dick Maas took Golden Earring’s groovy single and made a Bond-level spy thriller, complete with a sex club, an opera house and a firing squad. But how did he capture a bullet splitting a playing card’s edge in half?
IAN HUNTER “ALL OF THE GOOD ONES ARE TAKEN” (1984)
In one of my personal favorites, the former Mott the Hoople frontman falls for a waitress in an Arthur-type plotline. Hunter’s playful charisma gives him a clueless charm that buoys the tale, so we can forgive the ill-advised diner dance number. n * Indicates that the video aired on the first day of MTV Stephen Pitalo is a music video historian, New York-based VJ and publisher of the new Music Video Time Machine digital magazine. Visit musicvideotimemachine.com for more information.
