MTV Rewind Lets You Revisit 40,000 Music Videos & Commercials from the Golden Age of MTV

MTV still exists. At least, it still exists in the Unit­ed States, or in cer­tain of that coun­try’s mar­kets, for the time being. A flur­ry of pre­ma­ture obit­u­ar­ies recent­ly blew through the inter­net after the announce­ment that the net­work had shut down in oth­er parts of the world, Europe includ­ed. But even there, some expressed the sen­ti­ment that MTV had already died long before. And indeed, in the U.S., where it orig­i­nal­ly launched, ask­ing who remem­bers when MTV actu­al­ly used to play music videos has been a com­mon lament for decades, aired even by gen­er­a­tions too young to remem­ber those days them­selves. But mem­bers of any gen­er­a­tion can now relive them — or live them for the first time — through a new site called MTV Rewind.

The first music video that greets the vis­i­tor is The Bug­gles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” and appro­pri­ate­ly so, since it inau­gu­rat­ed MTV itself when it went live on August 1st, 1981. What fol­lows are all the rest of the videos played on that first day, like Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” Blondie’s “Rap­ture,” David Bowie’s “Boys Keep Swing­ing,” and Kate Bush’s “Wuther­ing Heights.”

(Oth­er, less wide­ly remem­bered entries include no few­er than three songs by Cliff Richard, which speaks to the then-incom­plete for­ma­tion of the kind of pop-musi­cal cul­ture we still asso­ciate with MTV.) The site’s oth­er playlists recre­ate oth­er eras and genre-spe­cif­ic pro­grams, from 120 Min­utes to Total Request Live, Head­banger’s Ball to Yo! MTV Raps.

Cur­rent­ly, MTV Rewind’s music video count comes to about 40,000, enough to ensure any for­mer addict of the net­work a stream of nos­tal­gia hits. But the site’s cre­ator (a 43-year-old Amer­i­can res­i­dent in Alba­nia, accord­ing to the New York Times, known pseu­do­ny­mous­ly as “Flex”) has also incor­po­rat­ed vin­tage sta­tion IDs and com­mer­cials, many of them liable to trig­ger down­right Prous­t­ian sen­sa­tions in the right view­er. What may feel refresh­ing even to curi­ous younger vis­i­tors is that, whichev­er chan­nel they choose, the next video that plays is deter­mined not by an algo­rithm attempt­ing to pre­dict their per­son­al tastes. Rather, each playlist is shaped by the pop­u­lar cul­ture of a par­tic­u­lar era, with enough left-field selec­tions to keep it inter­est­ing: just the sort of thing in hopes of which we used to flip over to MTV, back when the idea of stream­ing video on our com­put­ers still sound­ed like sheer­est fan­ta­sy. Enter MTV Rewind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the First 2+ Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Min­utes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

The Com­plete Col­lec­tion Of MTV’s Head­bangers Ball: Watch 1,215 Videos from the Hey­day of Met­al Videos

The Inter­net Archive Res­cues MTV News’ Web Site, Mak­ing 460,000+ of Its Pages Search­able Again

The 50 Great­est Music Videos of All Time, Ranked by AV Club

Revis­it Pop-Up Video: The VH1 Series That Rein­vent­ed Music Videos & Pop Cul­ture

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.