They Still Want their MTV

Nearly four decades after the Aug. 1, 1981, launch of MTV, the first cable television network devoted entirely to playing music videos, co-founder and Mississippi native Bob Pittman found himself back in his home state, surrounded by relics of the cultural revolution he helped ignite.

Pittman was on hand in May when the Grammy Museum Mississippi in Cleveland unveiled “MTV Turns Forty: I Still Want My MTV,” a comprehensive exhibition that tells the story of the Music Television network’s rise to prominence not only in music but also popular culture. Seeing the finished product, says museum executive director Emily Havens, wowed even the man who witnessed it all firsthand.

“Bob was certainly on board [and] he helped open some doors with the VJs and with MTV,” Havens says, but the finished exhibit exceeded his expectations. “I don’t think he realized what a big exhibit it was, and how comprehensive.”

“MTV Turns Forty” is the first exhibition fully conceived, researched, and produced by the staff and interns at the Grammy Museum Mississippi. The new exhibit, which will run through June 2022, was the brainchild of Lucy Janoush, a community educator and leader who served as president of the museum’s board of directors from its inception in 2011 under she passed away in 2017.

“She wrote notes to people to carry on without her,” explains Havens, “She really wanted us to do an exhibit honoring Bob Pittman. She wrote down an outline of what the exhibit might look like, and we were able to, a couple of years ago, decide that this was something we really wanted to pursue as a Mississippi team.”

Pittman and fellow co-founder John Sykes sat for interviews that became centerpieces of the exhibit. Once the team secured those assets, the acquisition process got easier.

“After we started curating that part of the exhibit, we were able to work on a lot of those individuals [who] had a wonderful collection of artifacts, from contracts to marketing pieces to T-shirts,” she says. “There’s the jacket that Alan Hunter wore on the launch, at his debut on MTV. And from there, we started looking at what artists we could reach out to, and we’ve gotten some great artifacts.”

The exhibit chronicles MTV’s beginnings, with the first set where “VJs” (video jockeys) like Alan Hunter, Mark Goodman, and Martha Quinn recorded their earliest on-air segments, and progresses through the network’s phases with sections like the dancefloor from Club MTV. Along the way, museumgoers can see iconic pieces of music history, such as outfits worn in videos and live performances for MTV by Sting, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.

“My favorite piece is a guitar Bret Michaels [of Poison] used on the ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn’ video,” says Havens. “And there’s a beautiful guitar and outfit from the VMAs (Video Music Awards) that Jon Bon Jovi wore and performed in,” she says of the rocker’s memorable 1989 duet with guitarist Richie Sambora on “Wanted Dead or Alive.”

I Want My MTV!
Despite the heights MTV reached, especially during its first two decades — replacing radio as the dominant engine for breaking and promoting new music, popularizing reality television programming with “The Real World” and other franchises, and becoming a cultural tastemaker whose influence crossed into politics during the 1992 presidential election — from the outset, the network seemed destined to fail.