"First of all, you needed a budget to do the video. The record companies would pick and choose who got videos"
About this Quote
MTV nostalgia often gets packaged as pure pop democracy: the right song breaks through, the right look becomes a movement. Nina Blackwood’s line punctures that myth with a mundane detail that’s actually the whole story: money first, art second. “You needed a budget” isn’t just a production note; it’s a quiet indictment of how gatekeeping works when a new medium arrives and gets sold as a revolution.
The specific intent is practical, almost deadpan, and that’s why it lands. Blackwood isn’t theorizing about capitalism; she’s naming the mechanism. Early music videos were expensive, unproven, and treated like a marketing gamble. So labels “pick and choose” not based on some neutral measure of talent, but on which acts were already deemed safe investments, which images were easiest to sell, which artists fit the brand a channel like MTV wanted to project. The subtext is that visibility was never evenly distributed; it was allocated.
Context matters: the early 1980s were a hinge moment when radio dominance started sharing power with television, and performers suddenly had to be legible on camera. That shift didn’t just reward charisma; it rewarded infrastructure. A video budget meant access to directors, stylists, rotation, and the feedback loop of exposure that creates a star. Blackwood’s phrasing makes the cultural point without grandstanding: pop history is often written like fate, but it’s frequently written like a ledger.
The specific intent is practical, almost deadpan, and that’s why it lands. Blackwood isn’t theorizing about capitalism; she’s naming the mechanism. Early music videos were expensive, unproven, and treated like a marketing gamble. So labels “pick and choose” not based on some neutral measure of talent, but on which acts were already deemed safe investments, which images were easiest to sell, which artists fit the brand a channel like MTV wanted to project. The subtext is that visibility was never evenly distributed; it was allocated.
Context matters: the early 1980s were a hinge moment when radio dominance started sharing power with television, and performers suddenly had to be legible on camera. That shift didn’t just reward charisma; it rewarded infrastructure. A video budget meant access to directors, stylists, rotation, and the feedback loop of exposure that creates a star. Blackwood’s phrasing makes the cultural point without grandstanding: pop history is often written like fate, but it’s frequently written like a ledger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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