For the past decade, I’ve been lamenting how I don’t know any new songs anymore. This same decade has been marked by a distance I inadvertently created from television. I left my childhood home in 2010, and since then, I’ve never had a TV in any of the houses I’ve lived in — first because of money, later because of pride. “Who needs TV when you have a laptop?” I’d say. And that, perhaps, is why MTV has decided to shut down five of its channels, including MTV Music. In some ways, I killed MTV or at least helped bury it under a pile of streaming tabs.
MTV trained my music sensibilities; it made me fall in love with serendipity. You never knew what song would play next. A VJ, always cooler, funnier, and far more confident than I’d ever be, decided that for you. Sometimes you hated what you heard; sometimes you fell in love before the chorus. You stayed because curiosity, not familiarity, was the key.
Now, everything I watch has learned to resemble me, my taste, my boredom, my nostalgia. The joy of MTV was that it wasn’t personal. It was public, and therefore, full of chance. You could stumble upon beauty; now beauty must be searched for. Maybe that’s why the songs don’t stay anymore.
This morning, when I told my Baba I was writing about MTV, he asked, “Is it the same channel you used to watch all the time?” I said it was. He laughed. “You never let us change the channel. It drove Aai crazy.” Growing up in small-town India, my parents were my source for old Hindi film music, but they couldn’t offer me anything from the West. MTV was the window that kept me connected to the cool kids, the ones who could afford Backstreet Boys cassettes, who knew who Tracy Chapman was, and for whom The Vengaboys Are Coming wasn’t the only anthem of pop.
Though MTV itself went through a kind of McDonaldisation in India, becoming the cultural equivalent of the McAloo Tikki, it still managed to serve us something new. Between Hindi hits and the rise of desi indie-pop, it shaped an entire generation’s listening habits and taste in music. I remember falling in love with Ronan Keating’s You Say It Best, discovering sexual tension in Robbie Williams and Nicole Kidman’s version of Somethin’ Stupid, and singing Savage Garden’s Truly, Madly, Deeply to a crush over the phone. All thanks to MTV.
Trawling through Reddit, I come across a comment that stays with me: “MTV died so Instagram could live.” Instagram, with its music feature, sometimes offers the illusion of discovery — If I like the clip on a reel, I look it up. But under the rule of the algorithm, that same song then follows me everywhere until I grow weary of it.
MTV asked us to listen; Instagram asks us to perform. Back then, music was something you stumbled upon. Now, it’s something you must attach to yourself, a caption, a reel, a mood board. The song doesn’t stay because it never truly belongs to anyone; it loops endlessly until it disappears into noise.
MTV allayed my small-town anxieties about not being cool or hip enough, especially after I moved to a bigger city. It taught me that the colour of confidence looks good on me. It opened a window to sounds I wouldn’t otherwise have heard. Sure, I outgrew Westlife and BSB soon enough, but the journey to other genres began there, Green Day, Pink Floyd, The Velvet Underground, and my beloved Andrew Bird. Without MTV, my ears wouldn’t have learned to listen, to be curious, to find my own sensibilities.
So yes, MTV walked so music apps could run straight into a wall of sameness. If I don’t know any new songs now, it’s not because I grew older; it’s because I stopped listening the way I used to. MTV didn’t just play songs; it made space for discovery. And maybe what I’m really mourning isn’t the channel, but the version of myself who still believed she could stumble upon something new.
Indurkar is a writer, editor, and poet from Jabalpur
