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mainstays received their first widespread exposure on this program, even though it aired after midnight on Sunday nights (Monday mornings.) This is where I got my first exposure to many artists, including R.E.M., The Cure and The Cult. Some of the songs I discovered on "120 Minutes" are still in my personal rotation, albeit now on an Ipod instead of a Walkman.

Another staple of early MTV was the broadcast of concerts. A seminal event in my life as a music fan was the June 1985 Live Aid concerts staged simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, and broadcast worldwide on MTV. Live Aid combined the social awareness of African Famine Relief with a festival rock concert. I was mesmerized by the performances of, among others, U2 and a Freddie Mercury led Queen. Another highlight was Tina Turner fronting The Rolling Stones who played "Its Only Rock and Roll."

Sometime in the middle of the decade, MTV became more of a television network, and less of a video jukebox, as they introduced news shows, and then launched reality television with "The Real World." My late college and early post-college years were marked by a near fanatical addiction to the cartoon series "Beavis and Butt-head." My young career was nearly derailed by an unfortunate incident in which myself and a fellow Gen-Xer replaced the pictures of an older co-worker's husband and children with the photocopied heads of MTV's degenerate adolescents. Perhaps that was a symbolic last gasp of our own adolescence.

Today, perhaps symbolic of the information explosion which occurred in the mid-1990s, there are literally dozens of MTV networks. MTV, MTV2, MTV Classic, MTV Raps, MTV Europe. Niche MTVs exist for almost every country or music form in the world. Other networks spawned as a result of MTV include the VH1 family of networks, and networks devoted to country music and rap music.

Nothing, however, can replace the original. So it is with a bit of nostalgia that I look back with fondness and say "Thank You MTV."

Learn more about this author, Tom Moilanen.
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