402. "Wild Wild Life" Talking Heads

"Wild Wild Life"
Talking Heads
True Stories
1986

A common thing for people born before 1990 to say is, "Remember when MTV used to play videos?" At one point, people would say this as a joke, because MTV at the time would air two or three hours of non-music video programming.
And then the joke stopped making sense.
24 hours of music videos turned into 20, turned into 16, turned into 10, turned into 5, turned into 2. And then they were gone, MTV took the "Music Television" graphic off their logo, and someone gave Carson Daly a talk show on NBC. And we all found YouTube.
But even more than that, to me, it was "Remember when MTV used to show interesting videos?"
We all know how "grunge" or whatever took over pop music (and thereby MTV) in the early 90s. But while some of the songs were great, most of the videos absolutely blew. Just a bunch of out of focus shit, some shots of an old guy without a shirt, a little girl playing by the train tracks, and the band playing in an abandoned warehouse somewhere. Boom, done, video made.
And MTV was behind the curve on that. They were hyping the new MC Hammer song in 1991, long after anyone with ears still cared. They were reacting to the trend, not creating it. Which is why nobody knows more than one song from Too Legit To Quit.
In the mid to late 80s though, MTV would play left field stuff even though it wasn't "popular music", per se. Now, the songs would become popular because MTV put them in heavy rotation, but without a video playing every two hours, there's no way a song like "Wild Wild Life" hits the Billboard Top 25 in 1986.
But it did. And thank god.
Because without this video, maybe John Goodman doesn't get cast as Dan Conner in "Roseanne". And without "Roseanne", he definitely doesn't play Walter in The Big Lebowski. And if John Goodman never plays Walter in The Big Lebowski, I'm pretty sure Y2K actually becomes a thing and we are all crushed under the foot of the zombie rabbit apocalypse.
So kudos to whoever it was at MTV in the mid 80s who played bands like Talking Heads, R.E.M., and Crowded House.
You saved a lot of lives.