A Love Letter to MTVU

This was originally published in 2019 and is presented here with minor edits.

I don’t remember how I found it—channel-surfing, probably, late at night on the tiny TV on my bedroom nightstand trying to find something to watch until I fell asleep. I didn’t like laying in bed in silence. I preferred to have something on, to set my sleep timer and doze off to a late-night talk show or a special on TLC about a rare medical condition or, sometimes, music videos. While VH1 and MTV had largely scrapped music programming in favor of reality shows and dating competitions, late at night, one could still find a solid block of music videos. When I was lucky, I could flip between the two and catch videos I liked, and when I was really lucky, one of them would play enough in a row that I’d fall asleep. And then I found a third option.

A local college, the little California University located in California, PA, broadcast a station featuring university news and sports teams’ games, but when one of those wasn’t on—which was much of the day—they broadcast music videos as part of an apparent partnership with college network CTN, later renamed MTVU. And while VH1 and MTV broadcast the big hits of the day, MTVU’s focus was on the more alternative side of things, from indie rock to alt-rock to occasionally little-known hip-hop artists.

And because of that, I don’t even remember what made me stop to watch it—typically, if I didn’t recognize a song, I flipped to the next channel, and I was unfamiliar with most of what they played—but something caught my attention.

I both started and ended my day with MTVU. Early in the morning, during my routine of getting ready for school that I’d shortened as much as possible to just rinsing my long curly hair and putting on a little makeup, I’d flip through the Trinity of MTVU, MTV, and VH1 while I got ready, and at night, I flipped through them until I fell asleep.

While the rotation did include some bands I’d stumbled across on my own, like The All-American Rejects, Anberlin, or AFI, MTVU introduced me to much of the music that became the soundtrack to my teen years. It was Taking Back Sunday’s “Cute without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team),” Fall Out Boy’s “Grand Theft Autumn/Where Is Your Boy?,” My Chemical Romance’s “I’m Not Okay (I Promise),” Head Automatica’s “Beating Heart Baby,” The Dresden Dolls’ “Girl Anachronism,” Dropkick Murphys’ “Walk Away,” Nightmare of You’s “I Want to Be Buried in Your Backyard,” Muse’s “Time Is Running Out.” The network was even my introduction to The Killers, with a short segment featuring the new band from Las Vegas and their debut single “Somebody Told Me.”

One band led to another—a concert would introduce me to opening bands I fell in love with, too; an album would include a label sampler that served as a shortlist of new bands and albums to be on the lookout for. I was already clearly well on my way to loving not just specific musicians but music as a whole, but MTVU and the different, then-lesser-known bands it showcased catapulted me there.

Some say that the music you fall in love with in your formative teenage years always stays with you, and I still do love many of those bands today. I still know every word to those songs. As one of the few to still cling to CDs, I still have their albums, bought just after their original release. I still go to the shows, singing every word and hoping that despite great new material, the band will throw in just one song that’s now 20 years old for the fans like me who have been around since then.