losers weepers (2) mtv trip in time

sorting out stuff in your room is really an occasion for a trip back in time... provided you are as good at piling up stuff as i am :) so, apart from finding things that should've never been written, yesterday i also went through stacks of audio cassettes.

in case you are too young: audio cassettes (or tapes) are those plastic things with a magnetic band inside, that you inserted into cassette (or tape) players and you listened to music... and every once in a while, you'd hear your favourite song completely distorted and it was no studio special effect, but the tape inside getting all messed up and you'd spend an hour gently pulling it from the player, trying not to wrinkle or god forbid, tear it.

yes, i am part of the generation who not only knows what they are... we worshipped them. it was back in a time when there weren't mp3s on every site (what is a site anyway?!?!), when cd-s weren't used as car decorations... when all you had was your radio and your... well, yes, mtv. and a walk-man for tapes if you were really hip. and you taped stuff. and you felt like it was easter when buying a cassette.

woo-hoo, those were the days. well yesterday, among other things, i found my... (ok, buckle up and hang on to your seats, folks) well... errrm... take that and east 17 tapes :D


yup, i owned those. i caught the Take That bug on the last few meters of their career, admittedly. and i was the weirdo who tought neither robbie nor mark the cutest, but jason (is anyone out there following me here?!?!?). jason orange. hell, i wonder what he's doing these days... as for east 17... they had a couple of nice songs and well... yeah, i thought tony was a cutie (still following?).

i remember watching the video for e 17's hold my body tight on dial mtv each day... i knew all the dance moves... i noted and kept the charts... and i died with happiness when my first ever love bon jovi conquered the dial mtv charts with this ain't a love song... yeah, those were the days, when my only worries were whether it would be ingo or enrico presenting the show. and those guys were hot, and i mean hawt (ok, maybe it was just me being a hyperventilating teen).


which, finally, gets me to the main subject of this post :) it is good old mtv, in the days when it was still good. in the days when it was only mtv europe and people all over the continent had a say in the shows... when it brought people together and showed issues they all cared about. when it had a teletext to which i owe some friends (cheers!)... when it was showing an attitude, when it was an edgy thing ahead of its time... and not merely a commercial television showing all the latest crap.

oh, sure, they had crap back then. but they also had some great stuff. they had the unplugged shows (first thing i ever saw on mtv was the aerosmith unplugged), and yes, they had the hottest guys around - ingo schmoll and enrico silvestrin. there was also the great ray cokes and his davina on mtv's most wanted - hey i've still caught robbie williams' naked butt live on air, ya know... and... well, they had greatest hits and mtv wasn't ashamed or feeling out-dated to show bruce springsteen or dire straits or aretha franklin along with take that and nirvana - who were polarising the listeners at that time (i liked both :P)... and mind you, we are talking mid-nineties here.


now? i am sick of turning it on... stupid mtv regionalization was a disaster from my point of view. no hot news from the heart of musical europe - the uk. no europe-wide video text service. crap vj-s who lack both professionalism and charisma. shitty music and idiotic listeners. this isn't the mtv who rocked the vote, who hosted the show that gives out the free your mind awards, who promoted young artists with their mini-mtv-clips... this isn't the mtv of which i was proud to be a viewer.

that mtv... that is locked together with a bunch of other memories, that remind me of a time when... when the world was still in order. but that's another post. this one was just meant to revive some sweet memories: glueing my eyes to the tv every saturday for the european top 20 (i had three notebooks filled with weekly charts...), pinning up posters with ingo and enrico, laughing my ass out with ray, watching singled out on summer nights (instead of a slutty pimp-show dismissed), learning dance moves from east 17 on dial mtv, feeling close to kids my age during hanging out, crying when watching the groundbreaking video to everybody hurts and... well, yes, taking the first steps into the world of rock :)