Goodnight, MTV Gen X fades along with the network

When MTV finally goes off the air later this year, few will really notice. There won’t be a teary montage or a final broadcast of “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The network will simply vanish, an old frequency giving way to static. That somehow feels right.

The story of MTV is, in miniature, the story of Generation X itself — the so-called “MTV Generation.” Americans born between 1965 and 1981 watched every act of rebellion become a marketing campaign and every counterculture icon end up in an ad. Even when they saw through the trick, they couldn’t escape it. That self-awareness, once a mark of sophistication, hardened into detachment. For a time, it seemed as if Gen X and MTV were heralding a wider revolution, but in the end, they only revolutionized what appeared on screens. Now both are fading into black together.

That didn’t seem possible at the end of the 20th century. For its first two decades, MTV was a channel unlike any other: a 24/7 jukebox of short musical films. With its frenetic editing, neon graphics, and punk irreverence, the cable network looked nothing like the beige broadcast world of the 1970s. To teen viewers — who’d never been marketed to so explicitly — it was anarchic and liberating.

Ironically, MTV was a commercial failure when it first hit the airwaves in 1981: too niche, too weird, too hard to find. Then George Lois, a swaggering Madison Avenue ad man, stepped in. “Oh yes, MTV was a flop,” he later bragged. He repurposed a 1960s cereal jingle into a new rallying cry: “I Want My MTV,” bellowed by Mick Jagger. Suddenly, every teenager did. At its peak in the 1980s, a quarter of American teens tuned in and made stars of a new breed of telegenic musical artists — Madonna, Michael Jackson, and Prince — while glued to the channel’s news updates, VJ banter, surreal animations, and the occasional game show.

With that success came backlash. It seems quaint now, but MTV was once perceived as a symptom of Western decline not only by cultural conservatives, but also by Leftists who chafed at the network’s naked commercialism, the auctioning of soul and artistic integrity for fame. The ’80s punk band the Dead Kennedys even penned a song called MTV Get Off the Air! with scathing lyrics like: “How far will you go, how low will you stoop / To tranquilize our minds with your sugar-coated swill.”

But the dissidents were eventually drowned out, likely because MTV was the perfect embodiment of how the ’60s counterculture was transmuted into a new, enlightened kind of self-loathing consumer capitalism. Thomas Frank saw it coming three decades ago in The Conquest of Cool. The book described the shift: whereas the commercial culture of the postwar era preached a kind of benevolent conformism, the yearnings of the counterculture — the hunger for change, the suspicion of tradition, the faith in self-expression — became capitalism’s organizing principle. “Corporate America,” Frank wrote, “is not an oppressor, but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accoutrements, facilitator of carnival, trusted ally of the people, our slang-speaking partner in the search for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm.”

In other words, post-’60s capitalism learned to feed on dissent rather than suppress it. MTV didn’t create that shift, but it certainly televised it. Every few years brought a new “revolution” in sound, style, or attitude, not in order to resist the market, but to keep it in motion. In that way, MTV was less the voice of youth than the soundtrack of their domestication. 

No one embodied this contradiction more painfully than Kurt Cobain. As the late Mark Fisher wrote in Capitalist Realism, the Nirvana frontman “knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV.” He knew his every gesture, even his disgust, was part of the game. The more Nirvana raged against the machine, the more the machine amplified the feedback. Success meant incorporation, and to win was to lose. His suicide in 1994, argued Fisher, marked the ultimate defeat of “rock’s Utopian and Promethean ambitions.”

Indeed, after Cobain’s death, MTV swiftly domesticated the angst that had haunted him. By the mid-1990s, corporate executives wanted viewers to linger longer, not just drop in for a three-minute fix. So MTV did what it always did: the network reinvented itself to preserve its cultural monopoly. It marginalized the music videos that made it famous, and The Real World, Road Rules, Laguna Beach, and eventually The Hills made voyeurism and the self-commodification of “reality TV” a national pastime.

And then, as quietly as it arrived, MTV ceased to matter in the aughts. It was killed in part by the internet, but also by its own success. The rest of the culture caught up. Its jump-cuts and ironic style form the default language of the digital age. Commercials began to look like music videos, and politics started to sound like them. TikTok is MTV’s logical endpoint: infinite channels, no continuity, no water-cooler conversation. So when it was announced recently that the network would cease broadcasting at the end of 2025, I was, like many, surprised that it still existed.

The adults of Gen X have followed the same lonely trajectory into obscurity. There has never been a president who was a teen when Bill Clinton admitted to smoking marijuana on MTV in 1992, and there probably never will be (sorry, Kamala). In politics and business alike, Xers are the overlooked middle children of modern America — skipped over as Boomers cling to power and Millennials move in below. Gen X is the narrow band between them, the hinge generation. It was the last cohort to have a childhood without the internet, but the first to be raised entirely by TV. If the Boomers grew up in the glow of Leave It to Beaver and Millennials came of age online, Gen X lived in the phosphorescent half-light. It is destined to be viewed as a transitional generation between the old world and the new.

As a junior member of Gen X, I find it a bitter pill to swallow, which is why there’s a melancholy in watching that old neon logo flicker out. For all its flaws, MTV still belonged to a world that could experience things together. Everyone remembers where they were when Thriller premiered, or when Beavis and Butt-Head first cackled from the couch. It was still possible to talk about our generation, our songs, our shows, and MTV once made the world feel connected, charged, and alive, even if what was sold as a global village was really just a global mall. That connection has now dissolved into a billion glowing rectangles, each of us broadcasting into the void.

Video once killed the radio star; now, soon there may be no stars left at all — only infinite streams of AI-generated slop. Whatever.

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