Editor’s Note: Most posts on this blog are about practical pest control approaches and topics so your building is a welcoming and hospitable place that’s free of problems. That’s the work Bell Environmental does every day, and it’s what most readers come here for. We also work to help our BOMA NY and BOMA NJ Commercial Real Estate partners and property managers with transportation related news and updates that affect their buildings and occupants and contribute to this valuable community. Because Bell Environmental runs a large fleet, we pay close attention to our transportation network and how it impacts how we work, live, and play.
But every once in a while, a story pops up that has nothing to do with pest control, and everything to do with how we live, more than just how we travel around or in/out of our region. When I was working on my BOMA Transportation Reports, I realized this story was too good, too nostalgic, and too strangely connected to what we also talk about here all the time: movement, environment, and the shared spaces we all pass through.
Consider this blog a brief and worthwhile detour from pest control, a one-post side road. The next article will be back to pest solutions. But today, we’re taking a ride through something that helped shape a generation and reminded us of a truth that still applies whether you’re managing a building or just trying to keep your space protected
Now let’s say goodbye to MTV. 📺🎵
December 31 – The Day the Music Channel Died
Goodbye, Moonman: When MTV Was a Place (1981–2025)
Looking for the next slice of American Pie: Reflections on Community, What Was Lost and Remains
Don McLean sang ♫ “A long, long time ago…” ♪ in American Pie as a eulogy for the 1950s. The 1971 classic was an astute observation of how the turbulent 60s split Americans from being “in one place” to an adrift, ♫ “generation lost in space, with no time left to start again…” ♪
Ten years later, on August 1, 1981 at 12:01 Eastern time, a new “space” opened. MTV launched, fittingly, with a rocket 🚀. The 👩🚀Moonman, symbolizing spaceflight and the most powerful form of transportation, planted a flashing flag in a new frontier. He became the emblem of travel to a new cultural meeting place for America’s youth. People joined in one cable 📺🔌household at a time.
MTV captured a generation. Music videos became a new form of art and communication. Teens shared the same new language, images, heroes, and must-watch premieres. “I Want My MTV!” became a rallying cry. More than programming, MTV was a phenomenon.
MTV quickly became a daily meeting spot. Flip it on and you shared moments with millions of other teens. And now, that era is officially pulling into the station for the last time.
Paramount Global permanently closed the five MTV music channels at the end of 2025, ending a major chapter in music broadcasting. Our old, shared world is shrinking.
Saying farewell to MTV might seem off-topic for a Transportation report. In fact, it’s a must-cover subject. The M in MTV stood for Motion, Movement, and Machines, as much as Music. MTV was the thrill of going to a new place together. In the classic MTV era, the music video wasn’t just a clip; it was a vehicle. MTV didn’t just show vehicles (the bus, the yacht, the convertible, the hot rod,) it showed what vehicles meant.
Transportation as Metaphor: Wheels for the Feelings We Didn’t Have Words For
- Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” 🚗 was the sleek, fast dream that looks perfect until you realize it is also a warning light.
- Sammy Hagar’s growling protest “I Can’t Drive 55” 🚫was a generation’s impatience with limits distilled into one speed sign and a screaming desire to live fast.
- Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” was an escape and a promise of a better future.
- Rod Stewart’s “Downtown Train” 🚆 carried longing, with the city as a map of missed connections.
- Berlin riding on “The Metro” 🚇 captured the lonely truth of mass transit. We are surrounded by people, but still traveling alone.
- The Go-Go’s shared a pure travel anthem in “Vacation” 🌊 🎿 where water skiing and time off are the freedom we crave and envy.
- Madonna twirling and writhing on a 🦁Venetian gondola in “Like a Virgin” isn’t just a ride. It’s a metaphor for reinvention, romance, and arrival, carried through canals like a dream.
Sometimes MTV was loud, rambunctious, and unstoppable.
- It was the big yellow school bus 🚌in Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” 🏫👩🏫giving you a wild ride through a teenage boy’s fantasy.
- The ride conveyed the attitude. The Cars made the convertible its own kind of stage. Sunglasses on, models beside them, they cruised Boston and told the world to “Shake It Up.” The city was the canvas. The road was the runway. Style was the point. “Drive” was the other side of the same journey, the question behind every late-night ride: who’s going to take you home and care for you when the party ends?
- Duran Duran sailing in “Rio” ⛵ became a floating postcard of glamorous escape.
- Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” 🚓 with its sirens, swagger, and police cars tearing through city streets, played like the opening credits of a gritty TV show.
- ZZ Top’s Eliminator hot rod arrived like a fairy godfather to redress and reinvent the downtrodden.
- Whitesnake turned a sleek Jaguar 💚into a staging ground for our road fantasies. Even when singing ♪ “Here I Go Again On My Own,” ♫ you want the perfect companion with Big 80s hair, a captivating smile, and a car polished so perfectly it could reflect an entire dream.
- The Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly” ✈️turned an airplane into a comedic mix of control and chaos.
More Than Videos: MTV Was Transportation Between Genres
MTV reinvented old formats. It took aging concepts from American Bandstand and Soul Train and rebooted them into Club MTV and Total Request Live. The Dating Game was reinvented as Singled Out with the energetic Jenny McCarthy pushing crowds around. We tuned in for World Premiere Videos, daily TRL countdowns, and surprise artist visits. We laughed at our favorite stars getting pummeled on Celebrity Death Match, the anti-Super Bowl 🚫🏈Halftime show. MTV pioneered reality TV with The Real World. Later, it turned transportation itself into a reality genre with shows like Road Rules and Pimp My Ride.
So Where Does MTV Go Now?
MTV is not one place anymore. It will live on in fragments on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. It is everywhere and nowhere, endlessly available, but rarely shared at the same exact moment. Our favorite VJs became 📻 💿 disc jockeys on 🛰️SiriusXM and wrote a book about their behind the scenes adventures. Their boss, Tom Freston, who had his own wild ride at MTV to the top of the corporate ladder, 🪜 wrote his own freewheeling and riveting memoir.
Carson Daly resurfaced as a talk show host, emcee of The Voice. and entertainment reporter on The Today Show. Jenny McCarthy stayed on the public’s radar by judging The Masked Singer. The streaming era gives us new music, nostalgia, and remixes of music classics on demand. The past gets rebuilt into the present. You can hear it when Eminem reinterprets the spell of 🪄 Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra,” as “Houdini.” At the same time, Lady Gaga reinvents 🪄 the new wave “Spellbound” by goth legends Siouxsie and the Banshees into her own smash hit “Abracadabra.” The songs keep moving, even when the platform changes.
Dua Lipa 💃is an artist built for our current social media, distributed video era. She curates and continually remixes the 80s and 90s into modern pop spectacle that travels by algorithms. She’s the 2026 version of what MTV trained us to love.
If you ever need proof that universal youth culture is possible, look at how quickly “67” became a ubiquitous catchphrase. 67 = two digits accompanied by a juggling-hand gesture that serves as a snarky shorthand for “OK, old timer.” Gen Z and Gen Alpha united to cast Gen X and Millennials as the radio stars The Buggles warned would be dismissed.
“♪…Video killed the radio star. In my mind and in my car. We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far. ♫ ”
So… as Don Henley, the sage of The Eagles, warned ♪ “Don’t look back, you can never look back.” ♪ And ♪ “Don’t Look Back in Anger,”♪ even if you are a feuding Gallagher brother in Oasis. We will be grateful for our moment and keep driving.
MTV taught us something transportation planners know well: every generation finds a new route. Destinations, vehicles, and platforms change. But the need to connect and be together in one place does not.
MTV made generations feel like we were riding together. If one artist embodied its fearless, visual, kinetic spirit; the ability to look back, around, and forward; and change the cultural conversation it was Madonna. She was our True Blue 💙 80s muse. Our Lucky Star ⭐ started out by 🔥Burning Up. She Dress[ed] You Up in her love and made you take a 🎉 Holiday. She also warned the moment was fleeting, singing ♫ “If I ‘Live To Tell’ the secret I knew then / Will I ever have the chance again?” ♫
Don McLean noted our hunger for music, dance, merriment and connection He asked: ♪ “Can music save your mortal soul / And can you teach me how to dance real slow?” ♫ And lamented that by the end of the decade ♪ “We all got up to dance / Oh, but we never got the chance” ♫ Madonna got us up to🕺dance with “Into The Groove.” MTV gave us the chance. We danced _real slow_ to “Crazy For You.” She taught us how to “Vogue.”
Madonna evolved as the decades rolled forward. In the 90s, Madonna became both passenger and driver of the cultural shift, freezing time into a cinematic mood in ❄️ “Frozen,” then breaking it open with the rush of ☀️ “Ray of Light.” Even that video felt like time travel, with its retro-swinging, 60s-flavored energy that matched the era’s pop-culture rewind. She was a part of Austin Powers’ nostalgia refracted through a modern lens with “Beautiful Stranger.” And later, she captured the strangest truth of nostalgia itself 🕒: ♪ “Time goes by so slowly,” ♪ until suddenly it’s 📞“Hung Up” and gone.
Madonna showed us in 2000, the year of one of her many career rebirths and her cover of American Pie, that there is, in fact, ♪ “time left to start again.” ♪ She also reminded us of the whole point of MTV: ♪ “Music makes the people come together.” ♫
Thanks for reading!
-Glenn
