Hey I'm Brian Hyatt and this is Rolling Stone Music Now. I have with me

Monkapur-Kante and Rob Sheffield and David Fear and today we are going to talk about Rolling Stones list of the

greatest music videos of all time which we posted for the anniversary of the

birth of MTV.

And it's a really fun list.

As all our lists are, it's inevitably controversial,

even amongst our own staff, so there's stuff to argue about.

But I thought we'd start by talking about music videos themselves

as a thing.

And this is a very Rob Sheffield topic. I want to start with you maybe Rob and just talk about sort of the birth of music videos as a key form, the birth of MTV and what that meant good and bad for music. Broad topic for Rob Sheffield.

Well, before MTV began on August 1st, 1981, music videos were something you occasionally saw on shows like solid gold, you know,

if Billy Joel didn't show up, if he didn't feel like showing up and singing,

it's still rock and roll to me,

he'd send like a little video of him doing it.

And videos had a really small place in the promo scheme of things.

MTV was this channel that was 24 hours a day. They had 24 hours to fill and not many big

deal established stars made videos. So MTV was forced to play crazy stuff. They were forced to play all these crazy

androgynous new English bands who had videos. they just made videos.

MTV was forced to play all this stuff David Bowie did.

MTV had to basically come up with a new conception

of what rock and roll was. It saw itself as a rock and roll was.

It saw itself as a rock and roll station,

...