Electric youth

MTV was launched on August 1, 1981 at 12:01am by The Buggles “Video Killed the Radio Star”.  

Video didn’t kill the radio star though; it built a bigger connection between the artist or group and the people that listened to them. There are many things that people can say influences youth culture, but nothing can be bigger than the music video. I grew up in the eighty’s when MTV was just a baby. Video helped many areas of youth culture. Videos definitely helped the girls experiment with new styles.

(Photo courtesy of ladies)

Michael Jackson and a very large number of famous artists were able to show us that “We are the World”

For me the biggest influence of music video happened in 1988 a year after MTV had started a show called Headbangers Ball. When I discovered The Ball I was a junior in high school. At that time I was into the rebel stage not wanting to hang around parents and things of that nature, this music fit. I had a huge fascination with Ozzy Osbourne. There was a rumor at that time that Ozzy had bitten the head off a bat, so that made him a target for most parents. I had a few posters on my wall of Ozzy, and dad always threatened to take them down. If you wanted to really piss parents off in the eighties, Ozzy would be able to do it. Any parent is going to tell their child not to listen to someone that does such things. In their time things like that didn’t happen. You never heard of The Beatles beating a chicken to death have you?

(Photo courtesy of Atom)

The problem in the eighties was, the music I was listening to did not have a major avenue for video release until Headbangers Ball. When The Ball started it was only a two hour long show. The Ball went to three hours for a short time in 1988, and then went back to a two hour format in 1989 until 1995 according to Wikipedia.org (headbangersball@wikipedia.org). You can catch the new Headbangers Ball on MTV2 which started again in 2003. I used to tape all the episodes I could, my parents hated it, but that was the point right? What better to live up to what these bands represented, rebellion, than to do what you are not supposed to do.

The Ball showed a lot of long haired people singing about everything from Dangerous Toys “Teas'n Pleas'n” to Stryper “Calling on you”.  

That is a range you really don’t see in video shows now. No matter how you were feeling on a particular Saturday evening there was something on this show that you could agree with. To better understand it may help to remind you that Stryper was a Christian metal band that did well in the eighties and Dangerous Toys was a Texas born band

How you felt wasn’t the only thing people could associate with, we could also associate with the look these bands had. Most of what came out in the eighties was recorded and released on cassette or albums. So any trip to the local record store, yes these did exist at one time, we would peruse the covers of albums. We would begin to dress like the groups staring at us from the cover. A person or groups look was where the music video really had an influence. These albums gave us a glimpse into the groups look and video gave us the huge window we could see much clearer through. The videos showed us other ways to venture out and explore ourselves. When you actually saw these people on stage, and saw how people reacted to them, everyone wanted to look like that. It gives you the thought of being able to bring in the same amount of girls that Tommy Lee did, if only you could look like him.

(Photo courtesy of Anne Metz)

Not many ran around in just their underwear though, most followed a more clothed option. Everyone has seen the eighties headbanger at some point or another. They had a look that was very recognizable. To start with you had to have the long hair, you cannot bang your head without long hair it just doesn’t look right. The band with the ultimate hair at the time was Metallica. No one would deny at that Metallica was the king of metal. This was the look people strived for.

(Photo courtesy of Tom)

Then you add the jeans with all the tears in them. Most headbangers had a closet full of t-shirts that all were black with some metal band name on them. One of the most controversial and popular was the metal up your ass shirt.

(Photo courtesy of t-shirts.name)

Then to cover the shirt on the rare occasion that you, just felt like it, add the black leather jacket with a jean vest over it. You also had the people, such as me, that couldn’t afford a leather jacket so the jean jacket was the way to go. If you had just the jean jacket though it had to be covered in as many metal band patches as you could fit on it and at least one that covered almost the entire back of the jacket.

(Photo courtesy of Jim Shearer)

There were a few bands that could have been classified as glam rock or heavy metal that were played on The Ball. That was only because they had the sound for metal and the songs definitely defied authority, but they had more makeup and hairspray on than some of the women did at the time. Poison, Motley Crue, and Twisted Sister are the biggest ones. The songs these few bands sang rang out with rebellion, Poison asked if you could “Talk Dirty to me” behind the bushes. 

Motley Crue suggested people to be “Smoking in the Boy’s Room.” 

All these bands had a look similar to Twisted Sister. Dee Snider, the lead singer of Twisted Sister, is not a small guy but with him in four inch heels, with his hair six inches higher held in place with 3 cans of hair spray, and enough make up on to keep Revlon in business for a year and you have a very scary sight. Twisted Sister was able to get the youth of the day to answer the question parents had asked kids since the dawn of time and that was “What do you wanna do with your life?” and every kids answer was the same “I wanna rock”

We can’t forget the women of metal in the eighties. The women were really beginning to get into the metal scene when Joan Jett showed up wearing her skin tight leather suit. Jett had the jet black hair straight down, with a guitar slung across her body. That guitar wasn’t just for show she could really play. Fellow ex Runaways member Lita Ford had started to go solo in 1983 and rose to join the likes of Ozzy and Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue fame to record one of her most famous albums Lita. She too used the leather outfits, but hers were a little more revealing. In 1988 women were made a bigger part of the metal scene when Vixen arrived. This all female band had the metal sounds to run with the big dogs on The Ball. They had just the right amount of makeup to fit into the glam metal just a little less hairspray. Now women had someone to really look at and say “I can do that just as well as any guy.”

(photo courtesy of rock.zonet.us)

At the end of the eighty’s there was one song that would strike a chord for kids of the time. The song did not go high up the charts even though the album went multi-platinum. The song was done by a band that was just starting out in the major recording market. By the time it had come out everyone knew that “Dude looks like a lady” and we all knew there was a “Master of Puppets.” 

But Skid Row summed it all up in three little words because we were and still are to some degree the “Youth Gone Wild”