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Steel Notes Magazine
Review by — Gatemouth Wighat
Bongo Boy Rock n Roll TV Show Ep1088 “FEEL THE MUSIC”
Preamble: I grew up in a musical era that began with, among others, Beatles & Hermits &
Stones & Byrds performances on black & white broadcast TV. Then came the onslaught of
live and lip-synced performances by the original artists on television variety programs.
Broadcasters soon heard cable and satellite TV knocking, but try as they may, they couldn’t
keep it at bay. “I want my MTV” gave way to “Video Killed The Radio Star.”
Before long, anyone in any band who was halfway telegenic wound up in a music video,
performing the song or acting out some silly skit or worse, synced with some graphic
treatment that either really worked or accelerated the decline of the act it sought to
promote—Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” is worth noting here, if only for its
cannibalistic ball of confusion, the retched sum of all parts.
MTV, for all its inherent flaws, rolled merrily along, pumped up the volume and began
programming its dayparts with genre-specific batches of videos. Hip hop, rock, metal, punk
and glam were spread across the spectrum, twenty-four seven. Then, to prove either A)
that they were bored, or B) that they were crazy, the network that called itself Music
Television stopped playing music videos altogether.
That’s right—fin, the end, kaput.
MTV pushed some of its packaged video programs to its sister network, VH1. For itself,
MTV began generating some of the earliest and possibly raunchiest reality programs
known to all. But that’s a story for another day. Right now we need to crack the mystery:
Who Stole The Show from MTV? With no music television, how would we ever know who
to like, who sounded great but looked like dorks and vice versa? Depending whom you ask,
nobody cared or everybody cried. Music video budgets became part of the norm for artists’
contracts, rather expensive productions oftentimes recouped from the bands that hadn’t
yet broken through, big debts to shoulder before the band members had made Dime One.
BUT, all that’s ancient history—corporate-ized, compartmentalized and
deconceptionalized. Thank goodness BONGO BOY is still one of the strongest proponents of
individualism – in music, in music video and in all walks of life!
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