Forty years ago today, the music world changed forever.
On Aug. 1, 1981, the music video channel MTV made its debut, beginning a decadeslong run of influencing and changing pop culture through groundbreaking videos, eye-popping performances or zeitgeist-capturing reality shows.
Before the Video Music Awards, “The Real World,” “Jersey Shore” or “Teen Mom,” though, there was an inauspicious debut — which couldn’t even be seen on cable systems in New York City at the time — file footage of a NASA space shuttle launch, followed by an opening animation, an introduction of the cable channel itself and its “VJs.” Then the first video played: the appropriately named “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by the Buggles.
 
“It seemed like a transmission from some magical place,” said Foo Fighters frontman/Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl in the book “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution.”
“Me and all my friends were dirty little rocker kids in suburban Virginia, so we spent a lot of our time at the record store or staring at album covers. With music videos, there was a deeper dimension to everything.”
While it didn’t start with many videos – there were so few to choose from in 1981 that Rod Stewart had 11 different videos played in MTV’s rotation on its first day – it grew into a cultural institution that, despite seeing its pop-culture influence shrink in the era of iPhones, YouTube and TikTok, helped influence everything from music to fashion to politics.
“The market is so fragmented today,” 1980s pop-rock mainstay Huey Lewis told the Los Angeles Times. “You can’t have a hit now like we used to. Because then, everyone was focused on one thing at the same time. Everyone was watching MTV.”
