The commercials of MTV’s 1985 Top 100 Countdown
Truth be told, I knew what most of MTV’s top 100 videos of 1985 were before I even sat down to watch the eight-plus hours recording that was uploaded to the Internet Archive earlier this year. Bootlegs of this specific countdown have been circulating for a while, and you could find lists of it online no problem at all. Based on those lists, you could easily watch over 90 of the videos on YouTube at anytime, and with much better video and sound quality as well.
But that’s not fun at all! Because while it’s great to sit down and revisit some classic 80s tunes, the real joy of watching the original broadcast of the countdown isn’t just in the music videos, it’s in everything that surrounded it. Continue reading
MTV’s Top 100 of 1985, a look back (Part 9)
Okay so…what had happened was…
I totally had intentions of finishing this feature in a timely matter. I actually wrote 95% of it before I even published the first part, just to give myself enough of a head start. But the “I’ll write something funny to distract myself from the hell of 2020” mood I was in when I started this slowly morphed into a far less productive “everything is shit and I just wanna die” mood, and it’s really hard to write quips about “Sussudio’ when you’re in that headspace.
But I vowed to get this done by the year end and dammit that’s going to happen! So buckle up for the first half of the Top 20! We were already into the serious shit on the countdown, but things get real here. Save for one forgotten track by an artist whose already had one other forgotten track on this countdown, everything here is a straight-up classic. Even the bad songs. We’re in the timeless section now. Right now, at the very second you’re reading this, every song on this countdown is being played on the radio somewhere.
No matter how hard we want to get away from “Sussudio,” we just can’t I’m sorry. Continue reading