Growing up in Australia, before YouTube – the weekends were always to sleep in. School wasn’t a top priority for the next two days. For other people it may have been sport or a market, for us it was music videos. In particular it was two TV shows, Rage and Video Hits that’s soul purpose to play artists music videos of whose music singles were in the charts.
The first show on a Saturday would be Rage. It was a rule that whoever was up first was to switch on the TV and put it on the ABC, where Rage was already underway of their weekly Top 50 countdown. After the hits would finish, the show would continue to play videos until around midday.
Rage premiered on Friday 17 April 1987, and as of 2021 – it is the oldest show of its type. Soul Train, The Loop and Video His; that I will talk about later on, have all finished production. Rage’s schedule has not changed since its inception. On Friday and Saturday nights, Rage typically starts between 11 pm and 1 am. The program is classified ‘MA 15+’ until 5 am, and finishes at 12 pm on Saturdays and at 7 am on Sundays.
I remember some mornings I would get up super early (5am, which now is my normal wake up time), grab my designated blank video and put it in the VCR – commanding I have control over the remote. My fingers would hover over the record and stop button – as I would meticulously create my own playlist. Any child who has RSI from the tension knows what I am talking about. Because it was usually a three hour tape, and speaking for myself here, but I would not want to rewind it back to the start – the songs would usually be repeated. There was one tape I remember having that I did a one song take. It was marked with black texter ‘TANSY’S MUSIC VIDS – DON’T TAPE OVER’ and when the click of the end of the film and it began to rewind. I was so proud.
Back in the day in Australia, there were other music video shows, Video Hits was the one I remember. Even though with this show, I had more chance of catching the charts – I disliked it because of the ads. So, although I had the possibility of doing it later, the ads would ‘kill my vibe’ if I was also getting my dance session for the day in.
By the time I was in Year 11 and 12, I had a 300GB iPod that was filled with my favourite podcasts, that I can’t remember. This was about the time that a video embedding website would change the way we would watch everything. YouTube was the brainchild of three PayPal employees. In February 2005, though it was soon brought by Google the following year. Over the years there have been many changes to YouTube; however, in today’s world apart from watching YouTubers, the common thing it is used for is watching music videos.
Once I left school – I can’t really remember we carried on the tradition.
With the ability of being able to create your own playlists – it has never been easy to get the music you want to listen to right than and there. Though I don’t want to go back to the days were I would curse if my tape got ruined, I am proud of the fact that I know what a VCR is, and remember the sadly gone but not forgotten days of the music video show.
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