The other day I tried explaining MTV to my daughter. It started innocently enough — Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” came on, that haunting chorus repeating, I want my MTV… I was singing along when Jettie asked what MTV even was. I paused. How do you explain to a child born into infinite YouTube scrolls and algorithmic feeds that there was once a time when music lived on television — and that it changed people’s lives?
I reached for comparisons. “It was kind of like YouTube, but only music videos. Or like TikTok, but curated by grown-ups with hair-sprayed mohawks.” She laughed, but it didn’t quite land. It was one of those moments where nostalgia refuses translation. Because the truth is, MTV wasn’t just a channel. It was a portal. And for a kid growing up in rural Oklahoma, it was the first crack in the dome of fundamentalism.
I didn’t grow up with access to “the world.” Between church, school, and sports, my life was tightly controlled. Christianity wasn’t just a belief system — it was the entire ecosystem. There wasn’t much room to imagine that other ways of being existed, much less that they might be worth exploring. But then I got my own room. And in that room, I had a TV. And on that TV, I found MTV.
I kept it on constantly — background radiation for my adolescence. From Yo! MTV Raps to Club MTV, from Headbangers Ball to Friday night rock blocks, I soaked in every genre, every aesthetic, every strange and shimmering music video. Each one felt like discovering a forbidden spell in a language I wasn’t supposed to know. New Michael Jackson video premieres were treated like national holidays in my bedroom. It wasn’t just entertainment. It was a summoning. A call to more.
It’s no wonder the church fought back. I remember students handing out flyers at school, asking us to petition cable providers to remove MTV from our homes. It was “Satan’s network,” they said. And I — a dutiful youth-group leader — gladly took a stack.
Only I wasn’t handing them out.
I was throwing them away.
I was protecting the only mirror that had ever shown me something else. In hindsight, they weren’t wrong. MTV was dangerous. It was dangerous to control. And thank God it was.
When MTV began experimenting with reality television, it felt like a quiet intervention. I remember watching The Real World and meeting Norm — the first openly gay person I had ever encountered. Not in person, but close enough to matter. Until then I had only known sermons and slurs. Norm didn’t match any of the caricatures I had been warned about. He was funny. Kind. Awkward. Creative. Someone I would have wanted to be friends with. It didn’t just shift something. It revealed something.
Later, when The Real World talked openly about HIV, it gave me the courage to do something that still lives in my bones: I played in a basketball game against a kid with HIV. That might not sound radical now, but in early ’90s Oklahoma it was a quiet revolution. These weren’t episodes. They were exposures. They dismantled the scripts I’d been handed and replaced them with reality — raw, complicated, human.
There’s a reason it stays with me. It wasn’t just about music or culture. It was about possibility. MTV gave me a glimpse beyond the narrow hallway of ideology I’d been raised in. It didn’t hand me answers. It asked better questions. What if the world is bigger than your town? What if your beliefs aren’t the only beliefs? What if identity can be chosen instead of assigned?
It gave me options. And for a kid who had never seen options before, that was everything.
What MTV later became isn’t what I’m mourning. I’m not here to defend endless Ridiculousness loops or reality-TV marathons. The MTV I remember was chaotic, loud, occasionally cringeworthy — and radically open. It let weirdos and wonders through the door. It mirrored back the possibility that I could be more than what I’d been told I was allowed to be.
Today’s kids have unlimited content. But I’m not sure they have the event. The shared window. The moment that feels like a door opening instead of an algorithm nudging. And maybe that’s what I miss most.
So yes — I want my MTV. But not just the videos. I want the mirror. I want the music that taught me how to question. I want the strange, beautiful, chaotic doorway that showed me how to begin.
Rest in peace, MTV.
You were never meant to last.
But you lasted long enough for me.