Slippin Away

 I can remember moving into my one bedroom apartment down the hill from the University of Colorado. When I hooked up my General Electric deluxe eighteen inch television to the "free cable" offered with my new lease and turned it on, what to my wondering eyes should appear? 

Davd Edmunds' video for "Slipping Away" came roaring into my living room. It was the summer of 1983 and MTV had begun broadcasting two years earlier, but I had never lived with anything but aerial reception. The public television station coming out of Broomfield had been showing promotional films for songs on a late night weekend show called FM-TV, so I was familiar with some of the earliest experiments in the genre, but the idea that there would be an entire channel devoted to this burgeoning art form was thrilling to me. 

I left it on. I listened and watched like it was the radio. Even though there were certain clips in heavy rotation, I didn't mind because this was the future and I wanted to be a part of it. Music Television. All day. All night. On MTV. 

Mark, JJ, Nina, Martha and my personal favorite VJ Alan kept the hits coming. I would sit and stare at those three minute bits of crass promotion disguised as whimsical little movies over and over just in case something new would creep into the rotation. I didn't know it then, but I was becoming part of what cynics would label "The MTV Generation." 

Eventually I was told that the menu of channels offered by my landlords was being limited, but if I wanted I could sign up for cable TV to be pumped into my apartment through an extra little box that would sit on top of my television. MTV was suddenly so important to me that I didn't want to miss a single video, so I signed up with a little company called Comcast.

I have been paying this company an ever-increasing percentage of my monthly income ever since. 

Comcast is now Xfinity. Music videos are my links to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when my Friday and Satruday nightst tended to end in the same way: staring at whatever MTV would send me to sleep watching. 

But not anymore. This week MTV, or Music Television as it was once known, has decided to close down their music channels. Which pretty much makes them just TV now. Their corporate daddy Paramount-Redstone doesn't feel the need to program commercials for record companies that barely exist anymore. Instead they can focus on pregnant teenagers and a flurry of other "reality" shows that cost just as much as the camera crew to point at willing participants. 

Will I miss it? Not in the sense that I will flip around the far-too-many channels I have on my current cable menu searching out the Buggles, but enough that it rings in my head like that moment when you realize that things have suddenly gone quiet. 

Too quiet.