Alexis Petridis on MTV's wild years

'Why I miss the career-ending pop video'For much of the 80s, MTV was seen as the very antithesis of rock'n'roll. Videos, and the station that played them, were flimsy promotional devices, evidence of how shallow and image-obsessed rock had become. Serious musicians – Elton John, or Metallica, or the Smiths – disdained them: they made videos under duress, or not at all.And yet, reading Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks's oral history I Want My MTV, just published in the UK, what's striking is h...

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