vainandy said:

Once WTBS started airing "Night Tracks", I started tuning into to that because they played songs I had actually heard before plus they had a huge variety of not only pop/rock videos but also a few R&B videos as well.

(Sorry that shrunk)

"Night Tracks" was my main source for videos (I didn't have MTV until I went to college in '88). ABC had "Friday Night Videos," but "Night Tracks" was on two nights, and was on longer. I'd stay up until 2:00 or 3:00, just watching videos.

And that was pretty much the only way I heard pop music. Where I was, we had two radio stations that you could reliably pick up. One was country. One was pretty much adult contemporary--they did run the "American Top Forty" (Casey Kasem's countdown show) twice a week: new on Sunday, then an encore presentation the following Saturday. On toward the end of high school we finally got a pop station, but if it was a black (or black sounding) artist, you only heard them when they hit the top twenty. Until then....

And I've never lived anywhere where you could reliably pick up a soul/r&B/hip-hop station. Where I am currently there's a mess of country stations, a few top forty, some hispanic (I don't know styles well enough to identify what genre they focus on), some soft rock, a pseudo alternative rock, a couple of classic rock. The University of Arkansas has two stations, but the more powerful one (which you can get here in Bentonville) is primarily classical and news, with a few other things represented by niche shows on the weekend (some blues and jazz blocks, a celtic offering); the student-run station actually has a pretty free-wheeling variety, but I generally can't pick it up here (and we're only about 30 miles away).

So I'm pretty envious of what some of you describe. It's certainly broader than what I've had in my experience.

The Billy Squire video for Rock me Tonight was so bad, so cheesy that it singlehandedly killed his career.

Gunsnhalen said:

These videos... i have no words.

You would have to pick those out...

My biggest jaw dropper I remember from the early 80s was Frankie Goes To Hollywood's uncesored Relax video...