COVER STORY : COMMENTARY : MTV Led to the Rebirth of Rock in America . . . : . . . Now It’s Got to Work to Retain Viewers’ Trust

MTV won the allegiance of the young pop audience in its first decade. Now the music cable channel needs to earn the audience’s trust.

Rock ‘n’ roll television had been around for 25 years before MTV. The key to the network’s success was that it wasn’t conventional television when it started. It was, in several significant ways, rock ‘n’ roll radio. The format was designed by a former radio programmer, and it borrowed radio’s basic element: 24-hour availability.

Before MTV, you could see pop and rock stars on television--all the way back to appearances by Elvis Presley and the Beatles on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and on through the numerous daily weekly showcases, from “American Bandstand” and “Shindig!” to “Soul Train.”

But television remained secondary to radio as a force in pop all those years because you could tune to rock ‘n’ roll only a few hours a week. Radio was a constant companion.

You could wake to rock ‘n’ roll radio or go to sleep with it--even if, for the youngest fans, it sometimes meant slipping the radio under the covers so that parents couldn’t tell you were still awake. The stations became allies of rebellion for a generation in the ‘50s and ‘60s intent on declaring its independence from adults.

But MTV swept past radio almost overnight as a force with the young pop-rock crowd--and the ease of the victory was based on more than simply adding pictures to the sound. The breakthrough was capturing the allegiance of the audience.

In some ways, MTV marked the rebirth of rock ‘n’ roll in America. Radio in most of the country had become an increasingly reactionary vehicle in pop in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, one that filtered the creative lifeblood out of the music as programmers reached out to the largest possible audience, including adults who had long ago lost their interest in “cutting-edge” sounds.

By the late ‘70s, programmers resisted virtually every important new artist or trend, most shamefully the punk and new wave movement.

MTV changed all that.

The new channel aimed straight at the teens, and its campaign was only helped when parents recoiled at or ridiculed much of early MTV, from the inane chatter of the video jockeys to the sexism and violence in many of the video clips. The more parents turned off the channel, the more teens turned it on. “I want my MTV” was more than an advertising slogan. It became a battle cry.

That much of the game plan of MTV was visionary; the next key step was partly accidental. Many of the early videos available were by young bands, especially from England, that represented a break--in image and sound--from the traditional ‘70s corporate-rock style favored by rock radio in this country. The result was that teens not only had their own channel, but they had their own new heroes.

At the same time, MTV’s brain trust was quick to encourage record companies to use innovative directors who would bring an energy and zest to the videos that would affect everything from advertising and movies to concert staging, and would bring a new video emphasis to the star-making process.

The only thing that matched the technological impact of MTV was the network’s irreverence. The channel was willing to take chances--to be goofy and outrageous and experimental. Eventually, the network expanded its format to include programs with the kind of wacky, irreverent viewpoint that Fox Television would eventually specialize in.

“Remote Control” was a hoot. “Yo! MTV Raps” contributed greatly to mainstream recognition and support for rap. “120 Minutes” brought a sample of alternative-college rock to the heartland.

So what challenges are left?

Trust is the main one--the kind Rolling Stone magazine had before it became big business and had to select its cover subjects on the basis of newsstand sales appeal, and before old favorites, such as the Rolling Stones, began getting four-star reviews for releases such as the recent live album that most everyone else thought were largely throwaways.

You can sense MTV flexing its big-business muscles too and never more blatantly--or potentially dangerously--than in its tour sponsorship, a move that compromises both its programming (the inevitable Madonna or Janet Jackson weekends) and news judgment.

It was a wise decision a few years ago to add a news ingredient and hire Kurt Loder, a respected Rolling Stone writer, to oversee it. But the channel sometimes allows the line between news and programming to become blurred. It’s one thing to have Julie Brown get all giddy over some act, but it’s quite another to have Loder in that role at some tour opening.

Loder sometimes looks suspiciously like Robert Vaughn in one of those “infomercials” when he stands backstage and tells us how exciting it is and how you just have to catch the band when it comes to your city.

But the main way to build trust is to focus on music that matters rather music that happens to be popular. At present, MTV’s philosophy is to serve what people want, which might sound like exactly what a 24-hour music channel should do. Yet it is the same mistake that rock radio made in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Record sales and research may show that the most listeners want Bon Jovi, Wilson Phillips and Vanilla Ice at a given moment, but that’s the voice of the passive music fan--and following that voice is ultimately a dead-end street. It’s the active pop fan, the one who searches for passion and innovation, that is the best test of what’s important and lasting in pop music, and MTV needs to speak more directly to that voice.

This matter of trust--in terms of programming and the selection of music--isn’t important to MTV’s position as a power broker as long as the pop music audience continues searching for the kind of direction or unity of purpose that one associated with the pop audience in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

But if the audience does find some social causes to rally around and makes music a part of that movement, trust will again be important. If MTV is too tied to its own marketing interests and the musical status quo, then it could be humbled as quickly as radio was a decade ago. With all the opportunities for competition in the cable world, that’s no idle threat.