If going to see John Tucker Must Die with a thirteen-year-old wasn’t enough to make me feel old and out-of-touch, the news that MTV is 25 years old today is.

Looking back across the gulf of a quarter-century (gasp!), it’s kind of hard to remember what all the fuss was about, especially considering that (a) I now know that music videos had been around in one form or another for decades before The Buggles killed the radio star, and (b), so many of the early MTV stuff that we thought was so cool back in the day now appears so painfully shoddy and self-conscious. But then I guess you can make that argument about just about any media phenemenon a couple of decades after its birth.

The fact is, MTV was a big deal back in the day. Music videos influenced damn near everything that came after them, pop-culturally speaking. Fast, often unexpected edits, handheld cameras, and rapid in-and-out zooms — the so-called “MTV style” — are now commonplace in cinema and television programs; they weren’t before 1981. Storytelling is now accomplished as much through the pop tunes on the soundtrack as through screenwriting, virtually unheard of before the ’80s (unless you count musicals, of course, but I think they operate differently because the actors actually sing the song themselves in those). And the increased emphasis on the visual has pretty much purged the music industry of all the average-looking people. Honestly, can you imagine Roy Orbison getting anywhere these days, with his dorky bowl cut and bland features? Conversely, do you think you ever would’ve heard of the various boy bands and L’il Britney Spears if they’d had to rely on their musical talent alone? You can argue over whether or not pop music has suffered in quality because of MTV, but there’s no question that this new cable channel had an effect.

It had an effect on we who were there to see it, too. As cheesy as the old videos were, I think they both reflected and drove the zeitgeist of the moment in which my generation came of age, perhaps more perfectly even than the popular movies of the day. The Boomers had had Woodstock, with all its earthy sensuality and impractical peace-and-love-will-change-the-world dippiness. But my generation had its videos. Yeah, “Beat It” was a little too slick to be taken seriously and the guys in Duran Duran were androgynously pretty, but that was the confusing world we were growing up in, a place where all the old rules seemed to have been broken by the previous generation and no new ones had been set up to replace them. An article today in the New York Times suggests that the early videos were all about escape, and I think that’s a valid analysis. We wanted out of the mess left over from the Sixties and Seventies, the world we didn’t ask to inherit and didn’t really believe we could change, at least not in the naive, idealistic way our parents had believed, and the videos offered us all manner of escape fantasies, all tied up in neat three-minute-twenty packages.

A lot of the MTV discussion I’ve seen around the Web today has bemoaned the fact that the channel doesn’t really play many music videos anymore, relegating them to various sub-channels and to the wee hours of the morning. The more I think about it, however, the more I think maybe that’s a good thing. Because, as I said, the videos were ours, we who grew up in the ’80s. And I think maybe I like the fact that they never really went anywhere new after we grew up. Because that means they haven’t been taken away from us and changed into something else, like so many other aspects of our culture have been.

Yeah, MTV is 25 years older. So am I. The channel doesn’t play videos anymore, and I don’t really watch them anymore anyway. But at least I haven’t had to see them get co-opted and cheapened, at least not any more than they already were to start with. They remain pure and unsullied in my mind, and seeing them now is like a direct connection to the boy I used to be and the times in which I used to live.

Ah, hell, I’m just rambling here and probably not making much sense, so maybe I’d better just shut up and show you a couple of my favorite classic vids. I’m no Martha Quinn, but I think I can introduce these well enough. First up is the big breakthrough classic “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits, featuring some primitive but charming CG animation and a nice riff on MTV’s own slogan from back in the day:

And now here’s one of the most infectious tunes of the ’80s and some of the most haunting, visually arresting visual effects ever produced for a music video, “Take on Me” by a-ha:

Enjoy, everyone — back in the morning with more nostalgic nonsense…