So MTV turned 40. It’s like an old high-school friendship rediscovered on Facebook–we haven’t seen each other for years but I do have fond memories of it when we were kids. It was a force in shaping the culture of the early ’80s. Would there even be a Duran Duran or Thompson Twins without MTV’s dedicated efforts?

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My father, of course, hated it, which is what every counter-culture movement is supposed to do. We didn’t have MTV in our house. It is possible, however, dad just needed a moralistic excuse to not pay for cable, but that’s another post that I’ll write on my deathbed. The point is that MTV brought us into a very glitzy, shiny world full of music, titillation and pop culture. It delivered that endorphin rush that we now get from social media. You got to see what the cool people were watching and maybe, just maybe, a chance to see maybe some side-boob or up Tawney Kitaens’s silky dress.

But I did get my “I want my MTV!” time. Going to my friend’s house after school, we would watch video after video like today’s gamers watch their screens. You really got to know the VJs (AARP link!!!): handsome Mark Goodman, demure Martha Quinn and Your Black Friend J. J. Jackson. Music was my life and they delivered. I was hooked and I loved that.

But like binging on popcorn, it eventually left me feeling bloated, empty and a bit nauseated.

You see, I was a rocker. Van Halen, Deep Purple and The Who were my favorite bands. MTV played a broad variety of videos with an emphasis on the music I hated but everyone else loved: Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wham! and all that stuff.

So what I’d be left with was four hours of lost time watching their microscopic rotation of Madonna and Michael Jackson, followed by an MTV News segment which appeared to be recorded every morning and repeated every 25 minutes, followed by endless commercials mostly for Skittles. So I’d sunk an afternoon for a 50/50 chance to see “Another Tricky Day” if I was lucky.

As both MTV and I got a little older we both grew out of each other. I got broader interests and MTV got more off their central mission of playing music. They began to introduce show programming that still hewed to their underlying mission of corrupting the yoots and selling sex, but now with less music.

You really can’t blame them. Only a 15-year-old boy could spend an entire afternoon watching nothing but music and in that, they sort of boxed themselves in. But their loose commitment to the “M” kept them going through the next couple of decades. Don’t worry, I’m not about to get into the, “Remember when the ‘M’ in MTV stood for ‘music’?” That’s been played out.

Rather, I will go into how YouTube made music videos great again. Vevo and YouTube made music videos not only accessible but accessible on demand. Can you imagine my excitement when I saw the “Rough Boys” video for the low price of a 15-second commercial rather than three hours of wading through commercials, crap and repetition? Friend, I’m telling you, MTV will live on as nostalgia to Gen X and hipness to Gen Z, but if your passion, like mine, is the music itself, you’re living in the Golden Age.

So, MTV, I wish you a happy birthday. We should go to lunch sometime and discuss how our 401Ks delivered 15% this year and reminisce about old times. Thank you for the great memories.