Art & Creativity Quote by Nina Blackwood

“The heyday of video music was the mid 80’s” isn’t just nostalgia from someone who was there; it’s a verdict on a short-lived cultural regime where image and sound briefly mattered equally. Nina Blackwood, an original MTV VJ, isn’t remembering a genre so much as a power shift: for a few years, the music industry had to think like television. A three-and-a-half-minute single wasn’t complete until it had a visual hook you could recognize with the sound off.

The phrasing does quiet work. “Heyday” implies a peak followed by decline, and it smuggles in a critique of what came after: videos became more expensive, more formulaic, more tied to brand management than to risky style. Mid-80s MTV was still a relatively unregulated attention machine, before the channel’s drift toward reality programming and before the internet splintered the audience into niches. Back then, a video didn’t just promote a song; it could manufacture an identity overnight, turning artists into characters and pop into a shared national broadcast.

Blackwood’s celebrity vantage point matters. She’s naming an era when gatekeepers were visible and glamorous, when VJs acted like translators between scenes and suburbia. The subtext is slightly elegiac, slightly territorial: the mid-80s weren’t only the peak of “video music,” they were the peak of MTV’s authority. Calling it the heyday is also a way of reminding us that mass monoculture, for all its limits, created moments that felt collectively lived.