I WANT MY MTV!

By guest columnist Per Aksel Lundgreen (Apoptygma Berzerk / Angst Pop / Cronos Titan / Chinese Detectives / Shatoo / Sub Culture Records) MTV ended their transmissions at 6 AM on December 31st 2025, and it is hard not to appreciate or acknowledge the impact MTV had on me growing up.

The backstory of MTV

I lived on Kurland in Sarpsborg, the second place in Norway after Oslo to get MTV and Super Channel through Janco Kabel TV.

I was at the ripe age of 15 when MTV started airing; my sister was 12. We were the prime target audience. Young, and interested in (pop) music and the latest fashion. We lived in a grey and industrialized town where no real bands ever played and where cover bands came to die.

We had 3 record shops, and I had just started working at the biggest one, Borg Platebar. This was my dream job while going to school, and to stay up to date, I was reading up on New Musical Express (NME), Smash Hits, the Swedish Magazine OKEJ, and the more rock’n’roll oriented Norwegian Magazine, PULS, which I later worked for as a freelance journalist.

My sister and I had a ton of friends and schoolmates over every day after school, and we’d hang out in the living room with the TV as our newfound altar on where to worship this new pop culture. And we were willing to sacrifice ANYTHING to get our daily fix, be it sleep, school grades, a perfect attendance or a family dinner. We HAD TO consume what was served to us, at any given hour or minute of the day.

They did teach us that “commercials were cool”! We’d never seen them before, so we chanted along that the new Opel Corsa had five doors or stuttered when buying stu-stu-studio line, fixing gel, spike it, the way you like it! They destroyed us and brainwashed us into consumers with us singing along, smiling sheepishly.

But enough about that, let’s talk about the music!

The music on MTV

Pop music was at a huge peak in the early- to mid-80s and in this period, ANY band who had a music video got air time, because they had a 24-hour non-stop transmission going and all spots and slots had to be filled. A heavy rotation slot could make you a superstar overnight, and bands like The Human League, Duran Duran and Ultravox often attribute a large part of their success to the fact that they had music videos ready when MTV came around, and the promo babes at all the record companies dug up their old C-Cam and Betacam masters and used them for what they were worth, sometimes resulting in bands getting «hits» years after the original single was released.

Special interest programming came along, and Alternative Nation, Away From The Pulsebeat and 120 Minutes were the shows that presented me with so many viewing hours of pure bliss, fronted by the likes of Paul King and Marcel Vanthilt.

We watched Ray Cokes, Ronnie The Runner, Max Headroom, International Hour, Friday Night Video Fights and New Video Hour, and for many of us, especially in Norway, the pop music equivalent to Albania, it was the first time seeing our musical heroes in moving pictures, while at the same time discovering a ton of new ones.

It was a literal musical smorgasbord for us, and we were NOT on a diet, I can tell you, we stuffed ourselves on a daily basis. MTV filled a gap we didn’t even know was there, a 24-hour channel for the young, the posers, the hair-metal boys, the wannabes, the new-wavers, the pop-chicks, the people coming of age. It hit so far and so wide and it was inclusive, but not in a 2025 way, it just «was».

We learned how to dress, how to fix our hair, how to dance when drinking Coca Cola (no diet crap back then!) or wearing our LEVIS 501’s, or even how to spray paint our Dr Martens.

We drove our parents crazy, like all generations I guess, but for the very first time in history, the whole world of music and fashion was delivered into our living room, and everything changed overnight. Bright pastel colours, pilot sunglasses, LEVIS and Dr Martens took centre stage and when you were not at home, you got your fix through your yellow Sony Sports walkman and the latest mixtape.

The 80s were DEFINED by MTV and there was nothing you could do about it, like it or not, but unfortunately, with the arrival of social media and YouTube, MTV has not been relevant for decades, and when they became more TV and less music with all their reality shows and quirky MTV Cribs and “Springbreak” reports, it was definitively all over in my book.

However, the first 15 years were immaculate and the entire music world should thank you for it. The world was never the same after the arrival of MTV, and the cultural shift it imposed has forever set its mark on GenX and those after!

PS! For us, a small band in Norway, some time in 1994/1995, the Apoptygma Berzerk video for ‘Deep Red’ was aired on MTV, and we were ecstatic! Yeah it was at 4 AM, but who cares, WE had our video shown on MTV! Quite the feat back then, and something to be forever proud of.

A lot of output followed after that and many other videos were aired, but this “beginning” in the mid-90s helped us a lot! And the way MTV used to put on alternative and indie bands as long as they had a video and a good song, that was massive! Careers were made by this alone! That was the 80s and 90s equivalent of “going viral” today.

End of year but also end of an era…

(This observational piece was originally a Facebook post, but was carefully edited and formed into the format you’ve just read.)

MTV Video time!

Here are 26 videos presented on MTV back in the day that really had a huge impact on me. Maybe not the most famous or most successful songs from these artists, but arty, funny, cool or intelligent and very, very good!

Feel free to check them out on YouTube: