MTV, the Moon Man, and the Art of Collage

The MoonMen Before You, October 18, 2021

One of the Inktober prompts in 2021 was Moon. Instead of drawing a picturesque moon floating over a purple ocean and sky, something I’d done before, pop-culture me barged in and took over- much like when I chose a Pikachu theme for the Ash prompt in 2019.

I thought of the little MTV Moon Man instead, the astronaut who would gradually shape my visual aesthetics and train my musical ear growing up, (right after my dad’s old jazz).

The Moon Man was originally a bravado announcement: a shiny new cable channel staking claim on unexplored terrain. Here I give it a colonial jab. The original one flag became many. By the time he arrives in my drawing, others have clearly been there before. As if to say: You think you’re first? Cute. 

MTV showcased videos full of quick cuts and color jolts, beauty and chaos dancing in the same frame. It debuted in 1981, when I was four years old. Both sets of my grandparents had the channel before we did. My grandparents in the Dominican Republic had piggybacked the cable from their neighbors. My grandmother in Connecticut was a huge Michael Jackson fan, so I’m sure she enjoyed his videos on constant rotation.

So I absorbed all of this early and naively: Rod Stewart’s Infatuation. Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing (“and the chicks for free”). ZZ Top’s Legs. Not the most child-friendly, for sure. But those same videos cycling over and over again, that repetition, gave my anxious little brain comfort through predictability. Billie Jean. Beat It. Fun Cyndi Lauper and Whitney Houston full of confetti and ruffle skirts. Madonna! The Cars’ Drive would move me terribly, especially during childhood summers in the Dominican Republic when homesickness crept in. And then, mood whiplash- the Fresh Prince declaring how parents just don’t understand.

My ’80s childhood and ’90s adolescence was wide open to receive the early seasons of The Real World, Yo! MTV Raps, MTV News, MTV Unplugged, Liquid Television's Æon Flux, Daria, and MTV Downtown, just to name a few. Music and (pop)culture coming at me in sharp, jagged, fragments. 

MTV trained my eye for collage making.

Jump cuts. Clashes. Remix logic.

Sound with image. Fashion with politics.

It made space for the weird, unfinished, in-between misfits.

That’s the energy I still chase in my art. The tendency to be fragmented and yet still whole.

Of course there are parts I didn’t catch until much later: MTV’s racism and gatekeeping for example. It wasn't until decades later when I saw the 1983 footage of David Bowie putting Mark Goodman on the spot about why Black artists weren’t being played as much. 

MTV. The same channel that normalized hair-metal videos with women as scenery/props also aired videos that were subtle, intimate, strange, and emotionally complex. MTV. A collision of aesthetics. Some expansive, emotional and thought-provoking, some painfully limited and debasing.

And I know I’m not alone here in my reflective state. MTV shaped a generation as many have already asserted, and it touched those just before and after Gen X as well. It stopped playing music years ago, but the visual language sticks and lives on- in memory, nostalgia, music, and the way some of us still think in cuts and color.

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As I sat down to write this, I put on an old R.E.M. compilation CD that I hadn’t listened to in years. I didn’t even remember the track list, much less the order. But the first song that came on was in fact Man on the Moon. Jaw was dropped coupled with a joyful awe