1988

By 1988 MTV was no longer an American curiosity. MTV Europe had launched the previous year, and the video had become a genuinely international format with international expectations attached to it.

Yo! MTV Raps

The most significant thing MTV did in 1988 was start a hip hop show. Yo! MTV Raps put rap in front of a mass television audience that had largely not encountered it, and it became one of the channel's most popular programmes very quickly.

It is hard to overstate what this did. Five years earlier the channel had been under sustained criticism for barely playing Black artists at all. Now it was running a daily show that took hip hop seriously as music rather than novelty, and it played a real part in the genre's move from regional to global over the years that followed.

Craft as standard

By this point the basic competence level was high. A well made video in 1988 is properly lit, properly shot, well edited and coherent, in a way that a well made video in 1981 frequently was not. Michael Jackson's "Smooth Criminal", made as part of the Moonwalker project, is a good illustration: an elaborate period set piece with a famous piece of choreography, produced to a standard that would have been unthinkable at the start of the decade.

The flip side is that a certain amount of individuality had gone. When everybody can make a competent video, competence stops being interesting, and there is a run of technically fine, slightly anonymous videos through the late 80s.

What it means for the puzzle

Late-decade videos can be trickier than mid-decade ones, and this is why. The mid-80s peak gave you one enormous visual idea per video. By 1988 you often get high production values without a single defining image, which means less to grab onto when only a fragment of the picture is available. Expect to lean on the audio a little more again.

The 1988 videos in WTV

These 32 videos from 1988 appear in the game.

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