From the station

198 music videos and no radio format holding them together

2026-08-08

The Music channel is the biggest thing on this station — 198 videos, roughly a third of everything here — and the first thing worth saying about it is that it has no format.

Radio stations are built the other way round. A format is a promise about what you will not hear, and every station you have ever tuned to is defined at least as much by its exclusions as by its playlist. This channel makes no such promise. Turn the dial to it and you might get a French standard sung flat over a disco rhythm, or two teenagers from Miami rapping about car speakers, or an entire run of British guitar singles from 1995. The shuffle does not care, and that is deliberate.

What follows is not a ranking. It is a map of the pockets that have formed as the channel filled up.

The pocket where pop admits what it is

Some records are honest about being manufactured, and they are usually the ones that last.

Sabrina - Boys 1988 is Italo disco at its commercial peak — programmed bass, a hook repeated until it wins, a vocal delivered as attitude rather than performance. Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam (Official Music Video) is the Belgian record that helped drag European club music onto daytime radio. L'Trimm - Cars with the Boom (Official Music Video) is Miami bass built for car subwoofers rather than speakers, and it knows it: the song is about the sound system it was designed to be played on.

None of these are hiding anything. They were made to work in a specific room on specific equipment, and they do. The interesting thing about pop that is frank about its own machinery is how much less it dates than pop that pretends to be sincere.

The pocket where the video is the record

Fatboy Slim ft. Bootsy Collins - Weapon Of Choice [Official 4k Video] is four minutes of Christopher Walken dancing alone through a hotel, and it is remembered far better than the track under it. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps (Official Music Video) is a single unbroken performance in which the singer's distress is caught rather than acted, and it turned a New York garage band into something else entirely. Outkast - Hey Ya! (Official HD Video) stages a band that does not exist, played entirely by one man, in front of a screaming audience that also does not exist.

Music video was a marketing format that occasionally became an art form by accident, and the accidents are the ones still being watched two decades after the channels that carried them stopped playing them.

The Britpop shelf

A large chunk of the channel arrived at once, as a single import, and it shows: Oasis - Live Forever (Official Video), Blur - Song 2 (Official Music Video), Elastica - Connection (Official Music Video), Suede Animal Nitrate {Rage HD}, Pulp - Common People.

Imported in a batch, these behave like a batch — a scene arriving as a scene, which is roughly how it happened at the time too. Britpop was a press construction as much as a musical one, and hearing five of these in a row makes the construction audible: the same guitar tones, the same borrowed sixties chord shapes, the same specific Englishness being performed at slightly different levels of irony.

Pulp - Common People is the one that outlasted the label, because it is about something. The others are about being in a band.

The pocket where the argument is louder than the song

Some of these carry a fight with them.

Technotronic - Pump Up The Jam (Official Music Video) put one woman on the sleeve and another woman's voice on the record — the face the label wanted and the voice it actually used, treated as separable things. Justice Vs Simian - We Are Your Friends won an award and had the ceremony interrupted by someone who felt he should have won it instead, an episode now remembered far more clearly than the category.

Filed together, they say something about how much of pop history is credit disputes and public argument rather than music. The songs are the part that survives; the arguments are usually why anyone remembers the details.

The old stuff that does not sound old

Grace Jones - La Vie En Rose (live TV 1978) is a 1978 television performance of a French standard, remade as slow disco and delivered with a flatness that refuses everything the melody is asking for. Vanity 6 - Nasty Girl (1982) • TopPop is a 1982 record written and largely played by Prince for someone else to sing, built out of a hard drum machine and a great deal of empty space. RUN DMC - Run's House (Official HD Video) is two MCs finishing each other's lines over a drum pattern with nothing else on it.

The common thread is subtraction. All three sound modern for the same reason: there is almost nothing in them.

Why 198 videos and no format

A station this size could easily be sorted into six tidier channels — one for hip-hop, one for eighties pop, one for guitar bands. It would be more useful and much less interesting.

The argument for leaving it unsorted is what happens in the seams. A Miami bass record followed by a Britpop single followed by a 1978 chanson is not a coherent listening experience, and it is exactly the experience that music television actually delivered, back when a single channel had to serve everybody and the ordering was somebody's rough guess at variety.

Turn the dial to Music and you get that guess. Occasionally it is a terrible one, which is also true to the source.