The MTV Video Music Awards show at Radio City Music Hall this year was, as it is every year, music at its most outrageous. There was Britney Spears doing a bump-and-grind strip; there was Eminem singing bleep after bleep; there was Jennifer Lopez flashing skin; there were Toni Braxton, ’N Sync, Ricky Martin, Sting, Janet Jackson, Limp Bizkit, LL Cool J, Christina Aguilera, Macy Gray, Steven Tyler, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers acting the royalty that they are. There, midst the klieg lights and the stretch limos and the red carpets, was the cultural phenomenon that is MTV.

Now watched by more than 340 million viewers in 139 countries (among them, Russia, China, and Vietnam), MTV has been credited with creating icons (Michael Jackson and Madonna leading a long and glittering list), influencing fashion, spawning movies and television shows (Flashdance, Miami Vice), saving the music industry, even ending the Cold War. Not to mention, according to its critics, leading several young generations to perdition.

MTV has shaped so much for so long, it is hard to recall a time when there wasn’t a blocky, graffiti-sprayed M (the channel’s break-all-the-design-rules logo is counted one of the most instantly identifiable on the planet) peering into the living room. But there was. Eons ago, when Ronald Reagan was in the first months of his presidency and Bill Gates had yet to make his first billion and cable television was boasting an unheard-of two dozen choices, there was no such thing as a 24-hour music channel, and many thought that just fine. A handful of those who didn’t worked at an organization called Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, wasec for infelicitous short. A joint venture of Steve Ross’s Warner Communications Incorporated and James Robinson III’s American Express, wasec was created in 1979 to provide programming for Warner Amex’s struggling cable systems. Its president was Jack Schneider, a crusty broadcasting legend who’d recently c...