MTV goes dark tonight

Can’t remember the exact moment I turned on my TV set and my life changed, but I sure do remember the chords that deployed the change. E to B to D and back, hard distortion powering thru, bringing the noise, three, four times; a man on the moon plants a flag, the riff gets dirtier, climaxes, the walls that make up my room come down, boom, new world, new Mike.

If after reading this you can hear the riff in your head, we can be friends; if not, I’m kinda sorry you missed it all, and I promise I will try very hard not to make this a trip down nostalgia lane, even though Martha Quinn’s boyish haircut insists we go that way.

Some context. In the early 80´s, I was a scrawny, geeky kid who read books by the boatload, played la plaquita out in the Santo Domingo streets, got straight A´s with little effort and dreamt constantly about girls and el Licey; a young, timid, pubescent man with no real prospects in life other than following the family tradition of going into construction, marrying young and retiring early to a mountain in DR —Punta Cana still a kiosk and a dream—. Good ol´ vintage eighties DR, a land of sugar cane (long before celebrity diets and the demonization of processed foods), winter baseball, dirty politics, Fernando Villalona and six local TV Channels. The last of these channels to arrive was called Teleantillas, and it rapidly became our sole connection to the North American cultural landscape, mainly through reruns of a few American TV series that, looking back and doing some math, may have already been going out of favor with the American public. The Harts, Dallas, The Six Million Dollar Man —El hombre Nuclear—, Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard. Every night a different series, every night a new episode brought home translated dialogues and blue-eyed villains, Robert Wagner and BJ´s chimp. Teleantillas sponsoring a third American invasion to these codependent shores, this one to the sounds of Waylon Jennings singing just a good ol´ boys on a Tuesday night.

This went on for a few years, coupled with one main rock station, La X 102, where we used to get our daily dose of Men at Work, Toto, Rick Springfield and other radio friendly voices (some of them, like The Producers and Scandal, only became famous in the DR, where they visited over and over, I imagine not quite knowing why). By then, I was deep into metal. Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osbourne crept into my life through vinyls and cousins that lived abroad. Pretty certain I was dying a virgin, I went full in, rejecting New Wave and any dancing-with-girls possibilities, headbanging to War Pigs in homo social situations, plastering my room with Hit Parader Magazine posters, Ronnie James Dio, Deep Purple, Scorpions along with some Cheryl Ladd and Pontiac Fieros for balance (Fiero, the working man’s Corvette, and the only car I’ve really, to this day, really desired, as in desired desired).

And then, it happened.

First Ensanche Naco, where all the cool kids lived, cause fuck you, that’s where everything in life starts, you geeky raggedy ass twerp. You’re just gonna have to wait. You’re gonna hear it through the Vans and Vuarnet grapevine for months and salivate. If a white pick up truck with the initials TCN came to your house, you were Soto on signing day golden. TeleCableNacional. Three letters that meant you were about to get hooked to the world. I’m not sure how it went down in the States, but in DR, this white pick up truck arrived at your driveway and you were about to go full Vistavision-Ken Kesey Acid Test on this black and white city’s ass, all for the price of a McDonald’s combo.

Cable, bro.

A few months later, I was hooked, literally and figuratively. So many channels, so many movies and ball games and cartoons and soap operas and advertisement and home shopping and violence and car chases and soft porn. But wait, here comes the kicker: all in beautiful, sonorous, exotic english. A relentless new untranslated universe where Harry Caray and Tales from the Crypt, Fraggle Rock and Sports Center and Vanna White lived. But most importantly, where music lived, for twenty four hours, all day, every day.

E to B to D and back.

Video killed the radio star. Shout it from the rooftops: we’re not in Gazcue anymore, Toto. This was no fluke, this was the missing piece, the picture was complete. This was gonna be my life. Saw Stewart Copeland rocking a stripes polo shirt while juggling a syncopated pattern and I knew it: I was gonna be a drummer, I was gonna be in a a band. Rock, in eighties DR. Makes sense, right? Stranger things have happened. A Dominican almost beat the Wright Brothers to the sky, going full Neil Peart while finishing high school was nothing. I was inspired, mesmerized. This was not a fad, this was a calling, and MTV was the mothership.

I remember writing the names of all the bands I got to love in the back of my geometry notebook. A to Z, dozens at first, eventually hundreds. My education was full blown on. From AC DC (whom by some Crowleian chance were translated into Dominican lore as Anti Christ, Devils Children and banned from any household that carried a Corazon de Jesus in their home) to ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons and Co. spinning those velvety Flying V’s. In between, a whole universe unraveled: B for Berlin, H for Howard Jones, G for Golden Earring, U for Ultravox, P for Psychedelic Furs, I for INXS, D for Devo. One hit wonders went global, good bands became classics while classics became inmortal, metal went full hair and makeup, grunge turned it all around. Headbanger’s ball, Unplugged, TRL. Alan Hunter, Mark Goodman, and of course, J.J. Jackson. Film directors also joined. Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, David Fincher, everyone wanted in. The writing was on the wall: in order to be successful, you had to go video first, radio second.

Back in DR, we were fighting the good fight, as Canadian perennial runner-up band Triumph would declare. A small movement of six or seven bands were slowly but surely turning heads, defying the merengue establishment and going full niche while attacking school dances and fairs, making a move for radio, a three prong attack that eventually led to what some now call “a golden age in Dominican rock”. I was right in the mix, I saw it all, wrote some of it. Auditoriums got bigger, crowds got crazier. We gained a following, scored a couple of number ones, made a name for ourselves, but the big bang never came. Eventually we fizzled out, became doctors, lawyers, engineers, a memory, a trivial pursuit question.

So here we finally are, December 31st 2025. MTV has a few hours remaining til it goes dark. I haven’t tuned in in maybe twenty years. I guess the world just moved on. I’ll put five hundred songs in your pocket, Steve Jobs promised his daughter, maybe it all went downhill from there, or maybe a twenty second lip sync video to a Taylor Swift song is where its at today. But back then, when the dinosaurs roamed the airwaves, there simply was no music without images, they went together like, well, like sound and vision, as archangel Bowie predicted, or as ramma-lamma-lamma-ka-dinga-da-dinga-dong , you pick.