The M No Longer Stands for Music

Yes, MTV still exists. No, they barely show music videos. Yes, the internet did it. No, I would not watch a single episode of Just Tattoo of Us or Ex on the Beach at gunpoint. Yes, the classic logo is gone, along with most of what the logo used to mean. And yes, moving to pay-TV was probably the most catastrophic self-inflicted wound in the channel’s history—a decision that accelerated precisely the irrelevance it was presumably trying to avoid.

None of which changes what MTV actually accomplished. Michael Jackson, Madonna, A-ha—their global reach was substantially shaped by the channel when the music video was still the primary medium of pop culture transmission. The format existed before MTV, but MTV gave it a permanent home and made it matter in ways that turned regional artists into worldwide ones. That’s a real legacy, even if everything since has been Jersey Shore and its descendants.

On a more personal level, without the music TV era I wouldn’t have encountered Nora Tschirner—a presenter who came up through the German music channel scene in the late nineties and later became a genuinely good actress. She was formative in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who didn’t grow up watching music television in that specific window. I owe the whole enterprise something for that, and I try to remember it whenever I’m tempted to just write MTV off entirely.

Puma released a collab with the brand—an RS-X sneaker and matching streetwear range that pulls on the visual language of nineties music television: future-retro palette, neon against grey, chunky sole and aggressive color. Whether a shoe fixes anything about what happened to the channel is not the point. Sometimes you just want to wear the logo of something that used to mean something, and sit with whatever that feeling is.