Last night, Dave Grohl used part of the Foo Fighters‘ Best Rock Video VMA speech as a call to “look a little harder” but “Never lose faith in real rock n’ roll music.” Just thirty-odd hours earlier, The Strokes, arguably one of the higher-profile recent standard-bearers for “real rock n’ roll,” were not exactly hiding—they headlined the main stage at the UK’s Reading Festival.
Apparently the band was a little abashed that they’d be playing afterPulp, because they invited that band’s lead singer Jarvis Cocker onstage to accompany them in a cover of The Cars‘ 1978 hit single “Just What I Needed.” Watch above as Cocker trades lines with Julian Casablancas (after the Strokes lead singer’s two false starts). This clip is just what we needed this afternoon.
While it’s hard for some of us (*cough*) older (*cough*) folk to believe that it’s been thirty whole years since MTV launched, in a lot of ways, it’s hard to remember a time when MTV wasn’t around. Of course, for people who consider themselves either Gen Y or a Millenial, MTV is something that is generally taken for granted because it’s always been there, but for those of us who are Gen X or older, the launch of MTV on August 1, 1981 was something that we now recognize as having impacted our culture in ways too numerous to count.
As we look back at 30 years of MTV—highlights of which have been playing all weekend long on VH1 Classic—we thought we’d take this opportunity to throw you back to the beginning of an era, days that even predated visionary video artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna. Of course, every trivia nut worth their salt knows that “Video Killed The Radio Star” was the first video ever played on MTV, but what about the next 29? Take a gander at our list below of the first 30 videos ever played on Music Television, filled with some artists that were later inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame (Rod Stewart, The Pretenders, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers) and some that we had never even HEARD of before today (PH.D, Robin Lane and the Chartbusters).
