Authenticity, artifice, ideology: Heavy metal video and MTV’s ‘Second Launch’, 1983–1985

Music video scholars have identified a ‘second launch’ of MTV during 1983–1985, a period when, as Andrew Goodwin writes, ‘MTV programmed heavy metal with a vengeance’. My article expands on the research of Goodwin, Lisa Lewis, Carol Vernallis and others in exploring the question of why metal emerged during this particular MTV era in the wake of British-based new pop, which had dominated the ‘first launch’ of MTV since August 1981. Central to my research is a more nuanced analysis of the metal subgenres that dominated programming between 1983 and 1985 – videos that are quite distinct both from the non-realist British new pop of bands such as ABC, Ultravox and Duran Duran and from the ‘hair metal’ that proliferated in the late 1980s.