If you happened to stop by the Blake household between 1988 and 1994, chances are you would have found me in the basement, nestled in a beanbag, watching MTV. I watched entirely too much television as a kid, and I was particularly transfixed by the channel formerly known as “Music Television.” If scientists wanted to do an experiment on the effects of MTV on the young minds of America, I might have made the perfect guinea pig. From the moment when we got cable when I was in the second grade until my early teens, when I started pretending to be too cool to watch MTV, I was a voracious and precocious consumer of the music-video format. After I saw the video for “I Want Your Sex,” I asked my mother what “monogamy” was. (“Umm, it’s a good thing,” she offered timidly.) I made my own VHS mix-tapes, recording videos by Faith No More, Tom Petty, and Guns N' Roses over old episodes of Father Dowling Mysteries. This way, rather than depending on Adam Curry, I could conjure up Axl and the boys whenever I wanted, like an analog version of YouTube.
For me, watching MTV during its heyday was a formative pop-cultural experience: My fondest memories of Christmastime TV don’t involve an actual series or special, but rather the endless loop of holiday-themed videos that used to play on MTV on Christmas Day. Even before it became a network targeted at 14-year-old girls, MTV was obsessively on-trend; back in the “Music Television” days this meant constantly updating the videos in regular rotation on the network and ruthlessly tossing aside anything that seemed out-of-date. MTV wasn’t afraid to play a video to death, but it lived in fear of playing anything that seemed musty or unfashionable. By the early ’90s, it was a rarity for MTV to play a video from the dark ages of the mid-’80s.
Happily, this stricture vanished on Christmas, the one day a year when MTV’s programming was totally predictable and willfully uncool. Time was you’d turn on MTV on Christmas morning—which I did, with alarming regularity—and see one of the same two dozen or so videos, a loop interrupted a few times an hour by a Christmas-themed MTV promo. Then it was back to the videos, which remained virtually unchanged from year to year: Run-DMC, Ramones, Hall & Oates, The Pretenders, John Mellencamp, Band-Aid. Every few years, there’d be a new Christmas hit to add to the mix, like Mariah Carey’s holiday juggernaut, “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” but the mix was predictable and oddly comforting.
In the pre-Internet era, the videos also offered a thrilling glimpse into the not-so-distant past. The 1984 video for Wham’s “Last Christmas”—one of my all-time favorite holiday pop songs, thank you very much—looked hilariously dated by 1989, even to my untrained eye. His pro-monogamy stance notwithstanding, it’s incomprehensible to think that George Michael, with his Princess Di haircut and lavender Ugg boots, was straight, but, hey, it was the ’80s. More anachronistic still was David Bowie and Bing Crosby’s famously incongruous duet, “Little Drummer Boy/Peace On Earth,” which was filmed in 1977 and reeked faintly of mothballs. Yet I was thrilled every Christmas when it popped up. For me, turning on the network on Christmas Day was a safe, affordable version of time travel.
Broadly speaking, MTV’s Christmas videos came in four varieties:
1. The Earnest Video
This is a pretty inclusive category, covering everything from Sting’s ponderous, deadly boring, and uncomfortably Jesus-y video for “Gabriel’s Message” to John Lennon’s lovely though heavy-handed “Happy Xmas (War is Over).” But, without a doubt, my all-time favorite is Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” less for its dubious Eurocentric lyrics (e.g. “There won’t be snow in Africa this Christmastime”) than for the low-fi, home movie-quality footage of hungover British pop stars. What better way to fight hunger than by puffing on some ciggies?