But the Wild West spirit fostered by the network in its early days led to some amazing juxtapositions: For every critically acclaimed song or big-budget gem, you’d get a dozen that, had you not been a middle-school kid riding a Mello Yello high, should have left you wondering, What just happened? It’s only decades later, in the dead of night, that the many artistic failures, visual disasters, and bouts with video dysentery you witnessed back then resurface in your memory, and you have to race to YouTube to prove to yourself that it all had to have been a terrible dream. Thanks to the rise of MTV, the eighties were a pioneering time in the development of music videos.
