Les sommes perçues par quelques personnalités du sport, du show-business ou de l’entreprise sont astronomiques, hors de portée du commun des mortels. Elles s’expriment en centaines, voire en milliers d’année de Smic. Qu’est-ce qui peut justifier de tels niveaux ? Certainement pas l’effort : les métiers les plus pénibles sont aussi les moins bien payés. L’effort physique, sauf pour les sportifs, est totalement dévalorisé. Les catégories les plus aisées n’ont pas la même notion du travail que la majorité de la population. Il s’agit très souvent d’activités qui s’apparentent plutôt à ce que d’autres, plus modestes, appellent du loisir (repas, lectures, etc.). Elles disposent, de plus, des moyens financiers pour se décharger des tâches les plus pénibles par l’emploi de personnel extérieur.

Les revenus des plus riches ne reposent pas sur les mêmes facteurs. Même s’ils disposent très souvent d’une équipe autour d’eux, les stars du sport ou du show-business doivent leurs ressources à un mélange de marketing savant et de talent personnel. Les dirigeants d’entreprise doivent leurs émoluments à leurs responsabilités, les décisions qu’ils prennent, mais pour une part beaucoup plus importante à la valeur créée par des milliers de salariés, rémunérés plusieurs centaines de fois moins qu’eux et qui pourtant œuvrent dans des conditions plus difficiles. L’affaiblissement des syndicats, représentants des salariés les moins qualifiés, de surcroît davantage touchés par le chômage, laisse plus facilement la voie libre pour octroyer des revenus aussi démesurés qui au final ne sont que très peu contestés.

(Ces douze étapes sont reprises de l'article en anglais A Practical guide to the hero with a thousand faces).

1. Le héros dans son monde ordinaire : il s'agit d'une introduction qui fera mieux ressortir le caractère extraordinaire des aventures qui suivront
2. L'appel à l'aventure, qui se présente comme un problème ou un défi à relever
3. Le héros est d'abord réticent, il a peur de l'inconnu
4. Le héros est encouragé par un mentor, vieil homme sage ou autre. Quelquefois le mentor donnera aussi une arme magique, mais il n'accompagnera pas le héros qui doit affronter seul les épreuves.
5. Le héros passe le « seuil » de l'aventure, il entre dans un monde extraordinaire, il ne peut plus faire demi-tour
6. Le héros subit des épreuves, rencontre des alliés et des ennemis
7. Le héros atteint l'endroit le plus dangereux, souvent en profondeur, où l'objet de sa quête est caché
8. Le héros subit l'épreuve suprême, il affronte la mort
9. Le héros s'empare de l'objet de sa quête
10. Le chemin du retour, où parfois il s'agit encore d'échapper à la vengeance de ceux à qui l'objet à été volé
11. Le héros revient du monde extraordinaire où il s'était aventuré, transformé par l'expérience
12. Le retour dans le monde ordinaire et l'utilisation de l'objet de la quête pour améliorer le monde (donnant ainsi un sens à l'aventure)

1.

Baysie Wightman met DeeDee Gordon, appropriately enough, on a coolhunt. It was 1992. Baysie was a big shot for Converse, and DeeDee, who was barely twenty-one, was running a very cool boutique called Placid Planet, on Newbury Street in Boston. Baysie came in with a camera crew-one she often used when she was coolhunting-and said, "I've been watching your store, I've seen you, I've heard you know what's up," because it was Baysie's job at Converse to find people who knew what was up and she thought DeeDee was one of those people. DeeDee says that she responded with reserve-that "I was like, 'Whatever' "-but Baysie said that if DeeDee ever wanted to come and work at Converse she should just call, and nine months later DeeDee called. This was about the time the cool kids had decided they didn't want the hundred-and-twenty- five-dollar basketball sneaker with seventeen different kinds of high-technology materials and colors and air-cushioned heels anymore. They wanted simplicity and authenticity, and Baysie picked up on that. She brought back the Converse One Star, which was a vulcanized, suède, low-top classic old-school sneaker from the nineteen-seventies, and, sure enough, the One Star quickly became the signature shoe of the retro era. Remember what Kurt Cobain was wearing in the famous picture of him lying dead on the ground after committing suicide? Black Converse One Stars. DeeDee's big score was calling the sandal craze. She had been out in Los Angeles and had kept seeing the white teen-age girls dressing up like cholos, Mexican gangsters, in tight white tank tops known as "wife beaters," with a bra strap hanging out, and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. DeeDee recalls, "I'm like, 'I'm telling you, Baysie, this is going to hit. There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal.' " So Baysie, DeeDee, and a designer came up with the idea of making a retro sneaker-sandal, cutting the back off the One Star and putting a thick outsole on it. It was huge, and, amazingly, it's still huge.

Today, Baysie works for Reebok as general-merchandise manager-part of the team trying to return Reebok to the position it enjoyed in the mid-nineteen-eighties as the country's hottest sneaker company. DeeDee works for an advertising agency in Del Mar called Lambesis, where she puts out a quarterly tip sheet called the L Report on what the cool kids in major American cities are thinking and doing and buying. Baysie and DeeDee are best friends. They talk on the phone all the time. They get together whenever Baysie is in L.A. (DeeDee: "It's, like, how many times can you drive past O. J. Simpson's house?"), and between them they can talk for hours about the art of the coolhunt. They're the Lewis and Clark of cool.

What they have is what everybody seems to want these days, which is a window on the world of the street. Once, when fashion trends were set by the big couture houses-when cool was trickle- down-that wasn't important. But sometime in the past few decades things got turned over, and fashion became trickle-up. It's now about chase and flight-designers and retailers and the mass consumer giving chase to the elusive prey of street cool-and the rise of coolhunting as a profession shows how serious the chase has become. The sneakers of Nike and Reebok used to come out yearly. Now a new style comes out every season. Apparel designers used to have an eighteen-month lead time between concept and sale. Now they're reducing that to a year, or even six months, in order to react faster to new ideas from the street. The paradox, of course, is that the better coolhunters become at bringing the mainstream close to the cutting edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes. This is the first rule of the cool: The quicker the chase, the quicker the flight. The act of discovering what's cool is what causes cool to move on, which explains the triumphant circularity of coolhunting: because we have coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie, cool changes more quickly, and because cool changes more quickly, we need coolhunters like DeeDee and Baysie.

DeeDee is tall and glamorous, with short hair she has dyed so often that she claims to have forgotten her real color. She drives a yellow 1977 Trans Am with a burgundy stripe down the center and a 1973 Mercedes 450 SL, and lives in a spare, Japanese-style cabin in Laurel Canyon. She uses words like "rad" and "totally," and offers non-stop, deadpan pronouncements on pop culture, as in "It's all about Pee-wee Herman." She sounds at first like a teen, like the same teens who, at Lambesis, it is her job to follow. But teen speech-particularly girl-teen speech, with its fixation on reported speech ("so she goes," "and I'm like," "and he goes") and its stock vocabulary of accompanying grimaces and gestures-is about using language less to communicate than to fit in. DeeDee uses teen speech to set herself apart, and the result is, for lack of a better word, really cool. She doesn't do the teen thing of climbing half an octave at the end of every sentence. Instead, she drags out her vowels for emphasis, so that if she mildly disagreed with something I'd said she would say "Maalcolm" and if she strongly disagreed with what I'd said she would say "Maaalcolm."

Baysie is older, just past forty (although you would never guess that), and went to Exeter and Middlebury and had two grandfathers who went to Harvard (although you wouldn't guess that, either). She has curly brown hair and big green eyes and long legs and so much energy that it is hard to imagine her asleep, or resting, or even standing still for longer than thirty seconds. The hunt for cool is an obsession with her, and DeeDee is the same way. DeeDee used to sit on the corner of West Broadway and Prince in SoHo-back when SoHo was cool-and take pictures of everyone who walked by for an entire hour. Baysie can tell you precisely where she goes on her Reebok coolhunts to find the really cool alternative white kids ("I'd maybe go to Portland and hang out where the skateboarders hang out near that bridge") or which snowboarding mountain has cooler kids-Stratton, in Vermont, or Summit County, in Colorado. (Summit, definitely.) DeeDee can tell you on the basis of the L Report's research exactly how far Dallas is behind New York in coolness (from six to eight months). Baysie is convinced that Los Angeles is not happening right now: "In the early nineteen-nineties a lot more was coming from L.A. They had a big trend with the whole Melrose Avenue look-the stupid goatees, the shorter hair. It was cleaned-up aftergrunge. There were a lot of places you could go to buy vinyl records. It was a strong place to go for looks. Then it went back to being horrible." DeeDee is convinced that Japan is happening: "I linked onto this future-technology thing two years ago. Now look at it, it's huge. It's the whole resurgence of Nike-Nike being larger than life. I went to Japan and saw the kids just bailing the most technologically advanced Nikes with their little dresses and little outfits and I'm like, 'Whoa, this is trippy!' It's performance mixed with fashion. It's really superheavy." Baysie has a theory that Liverpool is cool right now because it's the birthplace of the whole "lad" look, which involves soccer blokes in the pubs going superdressy and wearing Dolce & Gabbana and Polo Sport and Reebok Classics on their feet. But when I asked DeeDee about that, she just rolled her eyes: "Sometimes Baysie goes off on these tangents. Man, I love that woman!"

I used to think that if I talked to Baysie and DeeDee long enough I could write a coolhunting manual, an encyclopedia of cool. But then I realized that the manual would have so many footnotes and caveats that it would be unreadable. Coolhunting is not about the articulation of a coherent philosophy of cool. It's just a collection of spontaneous observations and predictions that differ from one moment to the next and from one coolhunter to the next. Ask a coolhunter where the baggy-jeans look came from, for example, and you might get any number of answers: urban black kids mimicking the jailhouse look, skateboarders looking for room to move, snowboarders trying not to look like skiers, or, alternatively, all three at once, in some grand concordance.

Or take the question of exactly how Tommy Hilfiger-a forty- five-year-old white guy from Greenwich, Connecticut, doing all- American preppy clothes-came to be the designer of choice for urban black America. Some say it was all about the early and visible endorsement given Hilfiger by the hip-hop auteur Grand Puba, who wore a dark-green-and-blue Tommy jacket over a white Tommy T-shirt as he leaned on his black Lamborghini on the cover of the hugely influential "Grand Puba 2000" CD, and whose love for Hilfiger soon spread to other rappers. (Who could forget the rhymes of Mobb Deep? "Tommy was my nigga /And couldn't figure /How me and Hilfiger / used to move through with vigor.") Then I had lunch with one of Hilfiger's designers, a twenty-six-year-old named Ulrich (Ubi) Simpson, who has a Puerto Rican mother and a Dutch-Venezuelan father, plays lacrosse, snowboards, surfs the long board, goes to hip-hop concerts, listens to Jungle, Edith Piaf, opera, rap, and Metallica, and has working with him on his design team a twenty-seven-year-old black guy from Montclair with dreadlocks, a twenty-two-year-old Asian-American who lives on the Lower East Side, a twenty-five-year-old South Asian guy from Fiji, and a twenty-one-year-old white graffiti artist from Queens. That's when it occurred to me that maybe the reason Tommy Hilfiger can make white culture cool to black culture is that he has people working for him who are cool in both cultures simultaneously. Then again, maybe it was all Grand Puba. Who knows?

One day last month, Baysie took me on a coolhunt to the Bronx and Harlem, lugging a big black canvas bag with twenty-four different shoes that Reebok is about to bring out, and as we drove down Fordham Road, she had her head out the window like a little kid, checking out what everyone on the street was wearing. We went to Dr. Jay's, which is the cool place to buy sneakers in the Bronx, and Baysie crouched down on the floor and started pulling the shoes out of her bag one by one, soliciting opinions from customers who gathered around and asking one question after another, in rapid sequence. One guy she listened closely to was maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a diamond stud in his ear and a thin beard. He was wearing a Polo baseball cap, a brown leather jacket, and the big, oversized leather boots that are everywhere uptown right now. Baysie would hand him a shoe and he would hold it, look at the top, and move it up and down and flip it over. The first one he didn't like: "Oh-kay." The second one he hated: he made a growling sound in his throat even before Baysie could give it to him, as if to say, "Put it back in the bag-now!" But when she handed him a new DMX RXT-a low-cut run/walk shoe in white and blue and mesh with a translucent "ice" sole, which retails for a hundred and ten dollars-he looked at it long and hard and shook his head in pure admiration and just said two words, dragging each of them out: "No doubt."

Baysie was interested in what he was saying, because the DMX RXT she had was a girls' shoe that actually hadn't been doing all that well. Later, she explained to me that the fact that the boys loved the shoe was critical news, because it suggested that Reebok had a potential hit if it just switched the shoe to the men's section. How she managed to distill this piece of information from the crowd of teenagers around her, how she made any sense of the two dozen shoes in her bag, most of which (to my eyes, anyway) looked pretty much the same, and how she knew which of the teens to really focus on was a mystery. Baysie is a Wasp from New England, and she crouched on the floor in Dr. Jay's for almost an hour, talking and joking with the homeboys without a trace of condescension or self-consciousness.

Near the end of her visit, a young boy walked up and sat down on the bench next to her. He was wearing a black woollen cap with white stripes pulled low, a blue North Face pleated down jacket, a pair of baggy Guess jeans, and, on his feet, Nike Air Jordans. He couldn't have been more than thirteen. But when he started talking you could see Baysie's eyes light up, because somehow she knew the kid was the real thing.

"How many pairs of shoes do you buy a month?" Baysie asked.

"Two," the kid answered. "And if at the end I find one more I like I get to buy that, too."

Baysie was onto him. "Does your mother spoil you?"

The kid blushed, but a friend next to him was laughing. "Whatever he wants, he gets."

Baysie laughed, too. She had the DMX RXT in his size. He tried them on. He rocked back and forth, testing them. He looked back at Baysie. He was dead serious now: "Make sure these come out."

Baysie handed him the new "Rush" Emmitt Smith shoe due out in the fall. One of the boys had already pronounced it "phat," and another had looked through the marbleized-foam cradle in the heel and cried out in delight, "This is bug!" But this kid was the acid test, because this kid knew cool. He paused. He looked at it hard. "Reebok," he said, soberly and carefully, "is trying to get butter."

In the car on the way back to Manhattan, Baysie repeated it twice. "Not better. Butter! That kid could totally tell you what he thinks." Baysie had spent an hour coolhunting in a shoe store and found out that Reebok's efforts were winning the highest of hip-hop praise. "He was so fucking smart."

2.

If you want to understand how trends work, and why coolhunters like Baysie and DeeDee have become so important, a good place to start is with what's known as diffusion research, which is the study of how ideas and innovations spread. Diffusion researchers do things like spending five years studying the adoption of irrigation techniques in a Colombian mountain village, or developing complex matrices to map the spread of new math in the Pittsburgh school system. What they do may seem like a far cry from, say, how the Tommy Hilfiger thing spread from Harlem to every suburban mall in the country, but it really isn't: both are about how new ideas spread from one person to the next.

One of the most famous diffusion studies is Bruce Ryan and Neal Gross's analysis of the spread of hybrid seed corn in Greene County, Iowa, in the nineteen-thirties. The new seed corn was introduced there in about 1928, and it was superior in every respect to the seed that had been used by farmers for decades. But it wasn't adopted all at once. Of two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied by Ryan and Gross, only a handful had started planting the new seed by 1933. In 1934, sixteen took the plunge. In 1935, twenty-one more followed; the next year, there were thirty-six, and the year after that a whopping sixty-one. The succeeding figures were then forty-six, thirty-six, fourteen, and three, until, by 1941, all but two of the two hundred and fifty-nine farmers studied were using the new seed. In the language of diffusion research, the handful of farmers who started trying hybrid seed corn at the very beginning of the thirties were the "innovators," the adventurous ones. The slightly larger group that followed them was the "early adopters." They were the opinion leaders in the community, the respected, thoughtful people who watched and analyzed what those wild innovators were doing and then did it themselves. Then came the big bulge of farmers in 1936, 1937, and 1938-the "early majority" and the "late majority," which is to say the deliberate and the skeptical masses, who would never try anything until the most respected farmers had tried it. Only after they had been converted did the "laggards," the most traditional of all, follow suit. The critical thing about this sequence is that it is almost entirely interpersonal. According to Ryan and Gross, only the innovators relied to any great extent on radio advertising and farm journals and seed salesmen in making their decision to switch to the hybrid. Everyone else made his decision overwhelmingly because of the example and the opinions of his neighbors and peers.

Isn't this just how fashion works? A few years ago, the classic brushed-suède Hush Puppies with the lightweight crêpe sole-the moc-toe oxford known as the Duke and the slip-on with the golden buckle known as the Columbia-were selling barely sixty-five thousand pairs a year. The company was trying to walk away from the whole suède casual look entirely. It wanted to do "aspirational" shoes: "active casuals" in smooth leather, like the Mall Walker, with a Comfort Curve technology outsole and a heel stabilizer-the kind of shoes you see in Kinney's for $39.95. But then something strange started happening. Two Hush Puppies executives-Owen Baxter and Jeff Lewis-were doing a fashion shoot for their Mall Walkers and ran into a creative consultant from Manhattan named Jeffrey Miller, who informed them that the Dukes and the Columbias weren't dead, they were dead chic. "We were being told," Baxter recalls, "that there were areas in the Village, in SoHo, where the shoes were selling-in resale shops-and that people were wearing the old Hush Puppies. They were going to the ma-and-pa stores, the little stores that still carried them, and there was this authenticity of being able to say, 'I am wearing an original pair of Hush Puppies.' "

Baxter and Lewis-tall, solid, fair-haired Midwestern guys with thick, shiny wedding bands-are shoe men, first and foremost. Baxter was working the cash register at his father's shoe store in Mount Prospect, Illinois, at the age of thirteen. Lewis was doing inventory in his father's shoe store in Pontiac, Michigan, at the age of seven. Baxter was in the National Guard during the 1968 Democratic Convention, in Chicago, and was stationed across the street from the Conrad Hilton downtown, right in the middle of things. Today, the two men work out of Rockford, Michigan (population thirty-eight hundred), where Hush Puppies has been making the Dukes and the Columbias in an old factory down by the Rogue River for almost forty years. They took me to the plant when I was in Rockford. In a crowded, noisy, low-slung building, factory workers stand in long rows, gluing, stapling, and sewing together shoes in dozens of bright colors, and the two executives stopped at each production station and described it in detail. Lewis and Baxter know shoes. But they would be the first to admit that they don't know cool. "Miller was saying that there is something going on with the shoes-that Isaac Mizrahi was wearing the shoes for his personal use," Lewis told me. We were seated around the conference table in the Hush Puppies headquarters in Rockford, with the snow and the trees outside and a big water tower behind us. "I think it's fair to say that at the time we had no idea who Isaac Mizrahi was."

By late 1994, things had begun to happen in a rush. First, the designer John Bartlett called. He wanted to use Hush Puppies as accessories in his spring collection. Then Anna Sui called. Miller, the man from Manhattan, flew out to Michigan to give advice on a new line ("Of course, packing my own food and thinking about 'Fargo' in the corner of my mind"). A few months later, in Los Angeles, the designer Joel Fitzpatrick put a twenty-five-foot inflatable basset hound on the roof of his store on La Brea Avenue and gutted his adjoining art gallery to turn it into a Hush Puppies department, and even before he opened-while he was still painting and putting up shelves-Pee-wee Herman walked in and asked for a couple of pairs. Pee-wee Herman! "It was total word of mouth. I didn't even have a sign back then," Fitzpatrick recalls. In 1995, the company sold four hundred and thirty thousand pairs of the classic Hush Puppies. In 1996, it sold a million six hundred thousand, and that was only scratching the surface, because in Europe and the rest of the world, where Hush Puppies have a huge following-where they might outsell the American market four to one-the revival was just beginning.

The cool kids who started wearing old Dukes and Columbias from thrift shops were the innovators. Pee-wee Herman, wandering in off the street, was an early adopter. The million six hundred thousand people who bought Hush Puppies last year are the early majority, jumping in because the really cool people have already blazed the trail. Hush Puppies are moving through the country just the way hybrid seed corn moved through Greene County-all of which illustrates what coolhunters can and cannot do. If Jeffrey Miller had been wrong-if cool people hadn't been digging through the thrift shops for Hush Puppies-and he had arbitrarily decided that Baxter and Lewis should try to convince non-cool people that the shoes were cool, it wouldn't have worked. You can't convince the late majority that Hush Puppies are cool, because the late majority makes its coolness decisions on the basis of what the early majority is doing, and you can't convince the early majority, because the early majority is looking at the early adopters, and you can't convince the early adopters, because they take their cues from the innovators. The innovators do get their cool ideas from people other than their peers, but the fact is that they are the last people who can be convinced by a marketing campaign that a pair of suède shoes is cool. These are, after all, the people who spent hours sifting through thrift-store bins. And why did they do that? Because their definition of cool is doing something that nobody else is doing. A company can intervene in the cool cycle. It can put its shoes on really cool celebrities and on fashion runways and on MTV. It can accelerate the transition from the innovator to the early adopter and on to the early majority. But it can't just manufacture cool out of thin air, and that's the second rule of cool.

At the peak of the Hush Puppies craziness last year, Hush Puppies won the prize for best accessory at the Council of Fashion Designers' awards dinner, at Lincoln Center. The award was accepted by the Hush Puppies president, Louis Dubrow, who came out wearing a pair of custom-made black patent-leather Hush Puppies and stood there blinking and looking at the assembled crowd as if it were the last scene of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." It was a strange moment. There was the president of the Hush Puppies company, of Rockford, Michigan, population thirty-eight hundred, sharing a stage with Calvin Klein and Donna Karan and Isaac Mizrahi-and all because some kids in the East Village began combing through thrift shops for old Dukes. Fashion was at the mercy of those kids, whoever they were, and it was a wonderful thing if the kids picked you, but a scary thing, too, because it meant that cool was something you could not control. You needed someone to find cool and tell you what it was.

3.

When Baysie Wightman went to Dr. Jay's, she was looking for customer response to the new shoes Reebok had planned for the fourth quarter of 1997 and the first quarter of 1998. This kind of customer testing is critical at Reebok, because the last decade has not been kind to the company. In 1987, it had a third of the American athletic-shoe market, well ahead of Nike. Last year, it had sixteen per cent. "The kid in the store would say, 'I'd like this shoe if your logo wasn't on it,' " E. Scott Morris, who's a senior designer for Reebok, told me. "That's kind of a punch in the mouth. But we've all seen it. You go into a shoe store. The kid picks up the shoe and says, 'Ah, man, this is nice.' He turns the shoe around and around. He looks at it underneath. He looks at the side and he goes, 'Ah, this is Reebok,' and says, 'I ain't buying this,' and puts the shoe down and walks out. And you go, 'You was just digging it a minute ago. What happened?' " Somewhere along the way, the company lost its cool, and Reebok now faces the task not only of rebuilding its image but of making the shoes so cool that the kids in the store can't put them down.

Every few months, then, the company's coolhunters go out into the field with prototypes of the upcoming shoes to find out what kids really like, and come back to recommend the necessary changes. The prototype of one recent Emmitt Smith shoe, for example, had a piece of molded rubber on the end of the tongue as a design element; it was supposed to give the shoe a certain "richness," but the kids said they thought it looked overbuilt. Then Reebok gave the shoes to the Boston College football team for wear-testing, and when they got the shoes back they found out that all the football players had cut out the rubber component with scissors. As messages go, this was hard to miss. The tongue piece wasn't cool, and on the final version of the shoe it was gone. The rule of thumb at Reebok is that if the kids in Chicago, New York, and Detroit all like a shoe, it's a guaranteed hit. More than likely, though, the coolhunt is going to turn up subtle differences from city to city, so that once the coolhunters come back the designers have to find out some way to synthesize what was heard, and pick out just those things that all the kids seemed to agree on. In New York, for example, kids in Harlem are more sophisticated and fashion-forward than kids in the Bronx, who like things a little more colorful and glitzy. Brooklyn, meanwhile, is conservative and preppy, more like Washington, D.C. For reasons no one really knows, Reeboks are coolest in Philadelphia. In Philly, in fact, the Reebok Classics are so huge they are known simply as National Anthems, as in "I'll have a pair of blue Anthems in nine and a half." Philadelphia is Reebok's innovator town. From there trends move along the East Coast, trickling all the way to Charlotte, North Carolina.

Reebok has its headquarters in Stoughton, Massachusetts, outside Boston-in a modern corporate park right off Route 24. There are basketball and tennis courts next to the building, and a health club on the ground floor that you can look directly into from the parking lot. The front lobby is adorned with shrines for all of Reebok's most prominent athletes-shrines complete with dramatic action photographs, their sports jerseys, and a pair of their signature shoes-and the halls are filled with so many young, determinedly athletic people that when I visited Reebok headquarters I suddenly wished I'd packed my gym clothes in case someone challenged me to wind sprints. At Stoughton, I met with a handful of the company's top designers and marketing executives in a long conference room on the third floor. In the course of two hours, they put one pair of shoes after another on the table in front of me, talking excitedly about each sneaker's prospects, because the feeling at Reebok is that things are finally turning around. The basketball shoe that Reebok brought out last winter for Allen Iverson, the star rookie guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, for example, is one of the hottest shoes in the country. Dr. Jay's sold out of Iversons in two days, compared with the week it took the store to sell out of Nike's new Air Jordans. Iverson himself is brash and charismatic and faster from foul line to foul line than anyone else in the league. He's the equivalent of those kids in the East Village who began wearing Hush Puppies way back when. He's an innovator, and the hope at Reebok is that if he gets big enough the whole company can ride back to coolness on his coattails, the way Nike rode to coolness on the coattails of Michael Jordan. That's why Baysie was so excited when the kid said Reebok was trying to get butter when he looked at the Rush and the DMX RXT: it was a sign, albeit a small one, that the indefinable, abstract thing called cool was coming back.

When Baysie comes back from a coolhunt, she sits down with marketing experts and sales representatives and designers, and reconnects them to the street, making sure they have the right shoes going to the right places at the right price. When she got back from the Bronx, for example, the first thing she did was tell all these people they had to get a new men's DMX RXT out, fast, because the kids on the street loved the women's version. "It's hotter than we realized," she told them. The coolhunter's job in this instance is very specific. What DeeDee does, on the other hand, is a little more ambitious. With the L Report, she tries to construct a kind of grand matrix of cool, comprising not just shoes but everything kids like, and not just kids of certain East Coast urban markets but kids all over. DeeDee and her staff put it out four times a year, in six different versions-for New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin-Dallas, Seattle, and Chicago-and then sell it to manufacturers, retailers, and ad agencies (among others) for twenty thousand dollars a year. They go to each city and find the coolest bars and clubs, and ask the coolest kids to fill out questionnaires. The information is then divided into six categories-You Saw It Here First, Entertainment and Leisure, Clothing and Accessories, Personal and Individual, Aspirations, and Food and Beverages-which are, in turn, broken up into dozens of subcategories, so that Personal and Individual, for example, includes Cool Date, Cool Evening, Free Time, Favorite Possession, and on and on. The information in those subcategories is subdivided again by sex and by age bracket (14-18, 19-24, 25-30), and then, as a control, the L Report gives you the corresponding set of preferences for "mainstream" kids.

Few coolhunters bother to analyze trends with this degree of specificity. DeeDee's biggest competitor, for example, is something called the Hot Sheet, out of Manhattan. It uses a panel of three thousand kids a year from across the country and divides up their answers by sex and age, but it doesn't distinguish between regions, or between trendsetting and mainstream respondents. So what you're really getting is what all kids think is cool-not what cool kids think is cool, which is a considerably different piece of information. Janine Misdom and Joanne DeLuca, who run the Sputnik coolhunting group out of the garment district in Manhattan, meanwhile, favor an entirely impressionistic approach, sending out coolhunters with video cameras to talk to kids on the ground that it's too difficult to get cool kids to fill out questionnaires. Once, when I was visiting the Sputnik girls-as Misdom and DeLuca are known on the street, because they look alike and their first names are so similar and both have the same awesome New York accents-they showed me a video of the girl they believe was the patient zero of the whole eighties revival going on right now. It was back in September of 1993. Joanne and Janine were on Seventh Avenue, outside the Fashion Institute of Technology, doing random street interviews for a major jeans company, and, quite by accident, they ran into this nineteen-year- old raver. She had close-cropped hair, which was green at the top, and at the temples was shaved even closer and dyed pink. She had rings and studs all over her face, and a thick collection of silver tribal jewelry around her neck, and vintage jeans. She looked into the camera and said, "The sixties came in and then the seventies came in and I think it's ready to come back to the eighties. It's totally eighties: the eye makeup, the clothes. It's totally going back to that." Immediately, Joanne and Janine started asking around. "We talked to a few kids on the Lower East Side who said they were feeling the need to start breaking out their old Michael Jackson jackets," Joanne said. "They were joking about it. They weren't doing it yet. But they were going to, you know? They were saying, 'We're getting the urge to break out our Members Only jackets.' " That was right when Joanne and Janine were just starting up; calling the eighties revival was their first big break, and now they put out a full-blown videotaped report twice a year which is a collection of clips of interviews with extremely progressive people.

What DeeDee argues, though, is that cool is too subtle and too variegated to be captured with these kind of broad strokes. Cool is a set of dialects, not a language. The L Report can tell you, for example, that nineteen-to-twenty-four-year-old male trendsetters in Seattle would most like to meet, among others, King Solomon and Dr. Seuss, and that nineteen-to-twenty-four-year- old female trendsetters in San Francisco have turned their backs on Calvin Klein, Nintendo Gameboy, and sex. What's cool right now? Among male New York trendsetters: North Face jackets, rubber and latex, khakis, and the rock band Kiss. Among female trendsetters: ska music, old-lady clothing, and cyber tech. In Chicago, snowboarding is huge among trendsetters of both sexes and all ages. Women over nineteen are into short hair, while those in their teens have embraced mod culture, rock climbing, tag watches, and bootleg pants. In Austin-Dallas, meanwhile, twenty-five-to- thirty-year-old women trendsetters are into hats, heroin, computers, cigars, Adidas, and velvet, while men in their twenties are into video games and hemp. In all, the typical L Report runs over one hundred pages. But with that flood of data comes an obsolescence disclaimer: "The fluctuating nature of the trendsetting market makes keeping up with trends a difficult task." By the spring, in other words, everything may have changed.

The key to coolhunting, then, is to look for cool people first and cool things later, and not the other way around. Since cool things are always changing, you can't look for them, because the very fact they are cool means you have no idea what to look for. What you would be doing is thinking back on what was cool before and extrapolating, which is about as useful as presuming that because the Dow rose ten points yesterday it will rise another ten points today. Cool people, on the other hand, are a constant.

When I was in California, I met Salvador Barbier, who had been described to me by a coolhunter as "the Michael Jordan of skateboarding." He was tall and lean and languid, with a cowboy's insouciance, and we drove through the streets of Long Beach at fifteen miles an hour in a white late-model Ford Mustang, a car he had bought as a kind of ironic status gesture ("It would look good if I had a Polo jacket or maybe Nautica," he said) to go with his '62 Econoline van and his '64 T-bird. Sal told me that he and his friends, who are all in their mid-twenties, recently took to dressing up as if they were in eighth grade again and gathering together-having a "rally"-on old BMX bicycles in front of their local 7-Eleven. "I'd wear muscle shirts, like Def Leppard or Foghat or some old heavy-metal band, and tight, tight tapered Levi's, and Vans on my feet-big, like, checkered Vans or striped Vans or camouflage Vans-and then wristbands and gloves with the fingers cut off. It was total eighties fashion. You had to look like that to participate in the rally. We had those denim jackets with patches on the back and combs that hung out the back pocket. We went without I.D.s, because we'd have to have someone else buy us beers." At this point, Sal laughed. He was driving really slowly and staring straight ahead and talking in a low drawl-the coolhunter's dream. "We'd ride to this bar and I'd have to carry my bike inside, because we have really expensive bikes, and when we got inside people would freak out. They'd say, 'Omigod,' and I was asking them if they wanted to go for a ride on the handlebars. They were like, 'What is wrong with you. My boyfriend used to dress like that in the eighth grade!' And I was like, 'He was probably a lot cooler then, too.' "

This is just the kind of person DeeDee wants. "I'm looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set himself apart from everybody else, who doesn't look like his peers. I've run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy. I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hardcore band playing, and I say to myself 'Omigod, what's that guy doing here?' and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, 'Hey, you're really into this band. What's up?' You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I'm going to gravitate toward him, because, hey, what's Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?"

We were sitting outside the Fred Segal store in West Hollywood. I was wearing a very conservative white Brooks Brothers button-down and a pair of Levi's, and DeeDee looked first at my shirt and then my pants and dissolved into laughter: "I mean, I might even go up to you in a cool place."

Picking the right person is harder than it sounds, though. Piney Kahn, who works for DeeDee, says, "There are a lot of people in the gray area. You've got these kids who dress ultra funky and have their own style. Then you realize they're just running after their friends." The trick is not just to be able to tell who is different but to be able to tell when that difference represents something truly cool. It's a gut thing. You have to somehow just know. DeeDee hired Piney because Piney clearly knows: she is twenty-four and used to work with the Beastie Boys and has the formidable self-possession of someone who is not only cool herself but whose parents were cool. "I mean," she says, "they named me after a tree."

Piney and DeeDee said that they once tried to hire someone as a coolhunter who was not, himself, cool, and it was a disaster.

"You can give them the boundaries," Piney explained. "You can say that if people shop at Banana Republic and listen to Alanis Morissette they're probably not trendsetters. But then they might go out and assume that everyone who does that is not a trendsetter, and not look at the other things."

"I mean, I myself might go into Banana Republic and buy a T-shirt," DeeDee chimed in.

Their non-cool coolhunter just didn't have that certain instinct, that sense that told him when it was O.K. to deviate from the manual. Because he wasn't cool, he didn't know cool, and that's the essence of the third rule of cool: you have to be one to know one. That's why Baysie is still on top of this business at forty-one. "It's easier for me to tell you what kid is cool than to tell you what things are cool," she says. But that's all she needs to know. In this sense, the third rule of cool fits perfectly into the second: the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermeneutic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot even be adequately described to them. Baysie says that she can see a coat on one of her friends and think it's not cool but then see the same coat on DeeDee and think that it is cool. It is not possible to be cool, in other words, unless you are-in some larger sense-already cool, and so the phenomenon that the uncool cannot see and cannot have described to them is also something that they cannot ever attain, because if they did it would no longer be cool. Coolhunting represents the ascendancy, in the marketplace, of high school.

Once, I was visiting DeeDee at her house in Laurel Canyon when one of her L Report assistants, Jonas Vail, walked in. He'd just come back from Niketown on Wilshire Boulevard, where he'd bought seven hundred dollars' worth of the latest sneakers to go with the three hundred dollars' worth of skateboard shoes he'd bought earlier in the afternoon. Jonas is tall and expressionless, with a peacoat, dark jeans, and short-cropped black hair. "Jonas is good," DeeDee says. "He works with me on everything. That guy knows more pop culture. You know: What was the name of the store Mrs. Garrett owned on 'The Facts of Life'? He knows all the names of the extras from eighties sitcoms. I can't believe someone like him exists. He's fucking unbelievable. Jonas can spot a cool person a mile away."

Jonas takes the boxes of shoes and starts unpacking them on the couch next to DeeDee. He picks up a pair of the new Nike ACG hiking boots, and says, "All the Japanese in Niketown were really into these." He hands the shoes to DeeDee.

"Of course they were!" she says. "The Japanese are all into the tech-looking shit. Look how exaggerated it is, how bulbous." DeeDee has very ambivalent feelings about Nike, because she thinks its marketing has got out of hand. When she was in the New York Niketown with a girlfriend recently, she says, she started getting light-headed and freaked out. "It's cult, cult, cult. It was like, 'Hello, are we all drinking the Kool-Aid here?' " But this shoe she loves. It's Dr. Jay's in the Bronx all over again. DeeDee turns the shoe around and around in the air, tapping the big clear-blue plastic bubble on the side-the visible Air-Sole unit- with one finger. "It's so fucking rad. It looks like a platypus!" In front of me, there is a pair of Nike's new shoes for the basketball player Jason Kidd.

I pick it up. "This looks . . . cool," I venture uncertainly.

DeeDee is on the couch, where she's surrounded by shoeboxes and sneakers and white tissue paper, and she looks up reprovingly because, of course, I don't get it. I can't get it. "Beyooond cool, Maalcolm. Beyooond cool."

Malcom McDowel, The New-Yorker, 1997

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Otto de Habsbourg,
un siècle de mémoire vivante

Jean Sévillia
07/11/2008 | Mise à jour : 16:43 | Commentaires 12

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Héritier d’une des plus vieilles dynasties européennes, Otto de Habsbourg, au cours de sa vie, a lui-même changé plusieurs fois d’époque. Ici, à Rome, en 2004, lors des cérémonies de béatification de son père, Charles Ier, par Jean-Paul II. Ci-contre, avec l’empereur François-Joseph, en 1914. (Gamma)

En 1918, la fin de la Première Guerre mondiale bouleversait la carte de l'Europe. A près de 96 ans, le fils aîné du dernier empereur d'Autriche revient sur son passé, tout en restant attentif à l'actualité.

Le petit garçon aux boucles blondes qui, juste avant la Grande Guerre, pose aux côtés de François- Joseph, c'est lui. Lui encore qui, deux ans plus tard, assiste à Budapest au couronnement de son père, le nouvel empereur d'Autriche, Charles Ier, comme roi de Hongrie, et de sa mère, l'impératrice et reine Zita. Ces scènes, Otto de Habsbourg les revoit comme si c'était hier. Le monde de sa jeunesse a été englouti, mais lui est toujours là.

Le 20 novembre prochain, il fêtera ses 96 ans. Quand il reçoit dans sa maison de Pöcking, en Bavière, acquise au temps où le territoire de l'Autriche et celui de la Hongrie lui étaient interdits, il évoque volontiers ses souvenirs. Mais ce n'est pas ce qui l'intéresse le plus. Quand je l'ai quitté, après une discussion de plusieurs heures et après que, avec son exquise courtoisie, il m'eut retenu à déjeuner, l'archiduc avait du travail : il rédigeait alors une série d'articles sur l'élection américaine. Comparer les mérites respectifs de Barack Obama et de John McCain le passionnait plus, au fond, que de refaire le film de sa vie. Il revenait d'ailleurs d'un voyage d'études en Suède, et préparait une conférence qu'il devait prononcer à Budapest...

L'Histoire a du sens pour Otto de Habsbourg, à l'évidence, mais d'autant plus qu'elle éclaire le présent. L'entendre expliquer la guerre d'Irak comme une conséquence du démantèlement de l'Empire ottoman ou exposer la stratégie de Poutine dans le Caucase comme la continuation de la politique des tsars, c'est prendre une leçon de géopolitique d'un homme dont la mémoire franchit les frontières et les siècles. Si l'intéressé attribue sa longévité à son hérédité maternelle (sa mère est morte à 97 ans), quel est le secret de sa vitalité intellectuelle ? Sans doute ce goût de servir qui lui a été inculqué dès l'enfance.

Son père, détrôné et exilé, étant mort prématurément à Madère, en 1922, l'archiduc Otto, élevé par sa mère dans l'espoir de régner un jour, devient chef de la maison de Habsbourg à sa majorité, en 1930. Quand Hitler menace l'Autriche, il engage toutes ses forces et celles de ses fidèles contre le nazisme *. En 1940, sa tête mise à prix par la Gestapo, il doit rejoindre l'Amérique. Auprès de Roosevelt - son frère Robert agissant de même, à Londres, auprès de Churchill -, il se bat pour que les Alliés, après la guerre, restaurent une Autriche indépendante. Il restera néanmoins banni de son pays, où il ne pourra revenir qu'en 1966. Pendant vingt ans, de 1979 à 1999, il siégera au Parlement de Strasbourg, y montrant une étonnante connaissance des dossiers.

Aujourd'hui, à un âge que peu atteignent, Otto de Habsbourg ne se renferme pas sur son passé : il s'efforce sans cesse de déchiffrer l'avenir. Comment s'empêcher de rêver au grand homme d'Etat qu'il aurait été ?

« Travailler pour les autres »

Le Figaro Magazine - Quels sont vos souvenirs de l'empereur François-Joseph ?

Otto de Habsbourg - Mon arrière-grand-oncle avait quelque chose de Dieu le père. Je devais avoir 2 ans quand a été prise la photo où je suis appuyé contre ses genoux. On m'avait fait venir au palais impérial, à Vienne, pour la prise de vue. A l'époque, pour éclairer, les photographes déposaient une poudre sur un plateau et y mettaient le feu avant le cliché. Je revois la scène. Je me rappelle aussi l'enterrement de l'empereur, par une froide journée de novembre 1916. Je me souviens de cette longue cérémonie sombre, de la descente dans la crypte des Capucins, au milieu des tombeaux de la famille. J'avais 4 ans, mais j'avais perçu l'émotion générale. Il faut se représenter que François-Joseph régnait depuis 1848. En Autriche-Hongrie, l'immense majorité des citoyens étaient nés sous son règne, avaient vécu sous son règne, et beaucoup étaient déjà morts sous son règne. Il était donc plus qu'une personne normale : à lui seul, il était une institution.

Votre père, petit-neveu de François-Joseph, lui a succédé sous le nom de Charles Ier en Autriche et de Charles IV en Hongrie. Les rois de Hongrie étaient couronnés. Vous vous rappelez le couronnement de votre père, à Budapest, le 30 décembre 1916...

La cérémonie m'a sans doute plus marqué que les obsèques de François-Joseph. Ce couronnement était un sacre, dans toute sa dimension religieuse. Le monarque ceignait la couronne de saint Etienne, roi de Hongrie en l'an mille, celle-là même qui, aujourd'hui, se trouve au centre du Parlement de Budapest. J'ai suivi cette cérémonie fastueuse, et je m'en souviens jusqu'aux petits détails. Les assistants portaient le costume national magyar, mais il était coloré pour les catholiques et noir pour les protestants. Après le couronnement proprement dit, dans l'église Mathias, le roi montait à cheval et s'élançait sur la couronne du sacre : un monticule dressé avec de la terre venue de toutes les régions de Hongrie. Lorsque je suis retourné pour la première fois à Budapest, il y a une vingtaine d'années, j'ai visité les lieux en compagnie d'historiens. Alors que ceux-ci me montraient l'endroit où avait été édifiée la colline du sacre en vue du couronnement de mon père, je leur ai répondu qu'ils se trompaient, en désignant un autre endroit. Quelques heures plus tard, ayant vérifié dans les archives, ils sont parvenus à la conclusion que c'est moi qui avais raison.

Qu'est-ce qui vous a marqué au cours du règne de vos parents, de 1916 à 1918 ?

Mon père était presque toujours absent, parce qu'il voyageait dans tout l'empire et se rendait très fréquemment sur le front. C'est pour cela que, dès son accession au trône, il a été si actif pour la paix : alors que les autres chefs d'Etat restaient dans leurs bureaux à donner des ordres, lui, ayant vu de près la souffrance des combattants, connaissait les horreurs de la guerre. Ma mère, l'impératrice Zita, s'occupait des hôpitaux, des blessés, des malades. Ce n'est qu'avec la chute de la monarchie que j'ai pu vivre quotidiennement avec mes parents.

Votre père est mort en exil, à Madère, en 1922...

Après sa dernière tentative de restauration en Hongrie, les Anglais l'avaient relégué sur cette île. Nous avions tout perdu. Notre consolation a été l'attitude de la population, qui a été envers nous d'une humanité admirable. De petits paysans nous apportaient de la nourriture : c'était touchant. A la fin de sa maladie, qui n'a pu être soignée parce que nous n'avions pas d'argent, mon père a voulu que j'assiste à sa mort. Ma mère a été d'un immense courage. Aujourd'hui, certains voudraient que l'on transfère à Vienne la dépouille de mon père, qui a été inhumé à Madère. Je n'y consentirai jamais car cela irait à l'encontre du vœu de la population locale, qui souhaite d'autant moins s'en séparer que Jean-Paul II, en 2004, a béatifié l'empereur Charles.

Quelles ont été les conséquences de l'effondrement de la Double Monarchie ?

Benes, le président tchèque, a dit un jour qu'il préférait voir Hitler à Vienne que les Habsbourg : on a vu le résultat. Et après le nazisme, il y a eu le communisme. L'Europe centrale a ainsi subi cinquante ans de totalitarisme.

Après la guerre, vous vous êtes engagé en faveur de la construction européenne...

Je m'occupais d'abord des questions danubiennes, dans la continuité des idées de mon père. Mais je me suis aperçu que c'était un espace insuffisant pour une politique à l'échelle du monde. L'Europe, c'est une réponse commune à l'ambition des nations du Vieux Continent.

Quels sont les plus grands hommes d'Etat que vous avez connus ?

Le général de Gaulle mérite d'être cité en premier. On a dit de lui une chose très vraie : qu'il était l'homme d'avant-hier et d'après-demain. Solidement établi sur le fond de l'Histoire, il allait néanmoins de l'avant. Konrad Adenauer, le Rhénan, était un penseur de la même veine, doté d'une vision internationale.

Même quand le rideau de fer partageait le continent, vous êtes resté en contact avec les peuples d'Europe centrale...

Alors que, au début des années 60, j'ai eu les pires ennuis pour rentrer en Autriche, un pays libre, j'ai pu revenir en Hongrie, dans les années 80, quand le système communiste régnait encore. Mais tout allait déjà dans le bon sens. Je suis resté en très bons termes avec Imre Pozsgay, qui était alors un des responsables du Parti communiste hongrois. Il a fait beaucoup pour ouvrir son pays. Au fond, il était plus hongrois que communiste.

Quel est le grand atout de l'Europe ?

Sa culture. Elle est si profondément ancrée qu'elle peut permettre des rebonds qu'on ne soupçonne pas. Un retour du religieux est aussi possible : regardez le succès du récent voyage de Benoît XVI en France. J'ai une grande confiance dans votre pays. Ma mère était une Bourbon, le français fait partie, avec l'allemand et le hongrois, de mes trois langues maternelles, j'ai vécu quelques années à Paris, et je suis membre de l'Institut : en France, je me sens un peu chez moi.

La crise financière actuelle vous inquiète- t-elle ?

Plaie d'argent n'est jamais mortelle. Les plaies politiques, si.

A près de 96 ans, vous voyagez toujours, vous êtes consulté...

Oui, surtout dans les nouveaux pays européens. Mais vous savez, c'est assez normal : ma famille est dans la politique depuis sept cents ans. En quelque sorte, j'ai cela dans les gènes.

Qu'est-ce que l'expérience vous a appris ?

Qu'on a toujours avantage à travailler pour les autres. Cela prolonge votre vie énormément, en vous donnant des buts. Moi, j'ai toujours des buts.

The contests and promotions MTV used to build viewership projected the lunatic spirit.

John Sykes: I’d sit back and say, “All right, what wild, insane, off-the-wall dream can I come up with, put it on TV, have someone actually win it? How about a lost weekend with Van Halen? If you win, we’ll pick you and your buddy up in a Learjet and fly you off for 48 hours of pure decadence with the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world.” If you are 18 years old, that’s a great fantasy.

Richard Schenkman, production assistant: Kid from Pennsylvania wins, and we fly him to Detroit, where Van Halen is performing. The first night, he goes to the show. The band has a big sheet cake onstage, David Lee Roth brings him out, and, as the crowd go apeshit, they dump the cake on him and spray him down completely with bottles of champagne. Show’s over, they go backstage. Van Halen is drinking Jack Daniel’s and the kid is drinking Jack Daniel’s and everyone is getting drunker and drunker. Finally, they throw the kid into the shower to wash him off. A few minutes later, I hear “AAAAAAhhhhhhh … ” coming from the shower. Turns out, they threw one of their groupies into the shower, too.

The music, the mayhem, and the message were beginning to have an effect.

Mark Goodman:I was making a record-store appearance in Wyoming. I thought it would be like Spinal Tap and that there’d be four people there. Well, we round this bend and there are, like, 1,500 people. I thought, My God, who’s here? Then I realized: I’m here!

Marcy Brafman: I knew we were doing something right when I gave my dad an MTV T-shirt. He’d wear it, and the kids would want to mow his lawn for free.

Dom Fioravanti, general manager: I was living in suburban New Jersey and really getting it from the coaches of the local Pop Warner football team. They were accusing me of wrecking their program, because little boys were coming home from school and watching MTV all afternoon, instead of going out for football. But with my kids and all the kids in the neighborhood, I was something sort of special.

Judy McGrath: Tom Freston was in a barbershop one day, and everyone was asking for Rod Stewart haircuts, saying, “I saw it on MTV.” When it begins creeping into that part of the culture, you realized this was not just a couple of unemployed rock fans hanging around watching TV all day. Other people were starting to notice.

Alan Hunter: I kept my bartending job for a month, because I didn’t really know how MTV was going to do. Actor’s mentality. One night, I’m making a daiquiri for a guy, and he’s cocking his head, staring at me the longest time. Finally, he says, “Man, you look so damn familiar.” Then he snapped his fingers. “Man, your voice is familiar, too.” I said, “Where are you from?” He says, “Jersey.” I say, “You ever watch that MTV show?” He says, “Yes.” That’s when I began to realize that maybe MTV is going to be a job I can keep.

For all the buzz, MTV was hemorrhaging cash, as advertisers—the sole source of revenue—hung back, spooked by the continued refusal of most cable operators to carry the channel. Numbers told the story. At launch, MTV publicly claimed 2.5 million cable customers. In fact, MTV executives admit, the total was well below a million.

Beverly Weinstein, ad sales: The first year, we were lucky if we made $1 million in sales. There was no interest, no ratings, no nothing. The ad biz is very risk-averse, and this was something that was brand-new. People just weren’t standing in line to buy it.

Jordan Rost, vice president, research: The people we needed to sell were not in the demographics, didn’t have passion about music, didn’t care what was happening in Council Bluffs. Until they saw their own kids going wild, they weren’t going to buy.

Fred Seibert: I went to a cable convention after we launched, and the talk on the floor was the Weather Channel, not MTV. Because that’s how old the operators were. They didn’t spend their weekends thinking, Who’s on Top of the Pops? They spent their weekends going, “Thank God it’s nice out.”

George Lois, ad-agency executive: Everyone considered MTV the stupidest idea in the history of communications. Rock ’n’ roll 24 hours a day? Talking to 16-year-old idiots? Sex, drugs, blah, blah, blah? It was a joke.

In early 1982, Pittman instructed Lois’s partner Dale Pon to devise an ad campaign that would break the logjam.

Dale Pon: They were scared. Everybody I ran into told me: “This has got to work. We’re counting on you, Dale. Don’t fuck up. In 45 days, new stuff has got to go on the air.” So I’m thinking about rock ’n’ roll and everything that is related to rock ’n’ roll. And the question I put to myself was “What’s your favorite rock ’n’ roll song of all time?” For me, it was the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction.” That helped me understand the true nature of rock ’n’ roll: insatiable desire. We’d done an earlier trade ad campaign called “Cable brats”—“Rock and roll wasn’t enough for them. Now they want their MTV.” We just shortened it to “I want my MTV,” an homage to a famous cereal campaign George did in the 60s. Then a partner of mine, Dick Gershon, had a brilliant idea: “Let’s advertise where there is no distribution, where the cable operator has said no. We say, ‘Call your cable operator, America! Demand your MTV! Here’s the phone number. Make them fucking sorry they said no.’ ”

Lois presented the pitch to MTV’s senior staff.

Les Garland: George comes rolling in with his easel and says, “Garland, who does MTV belong to?” Warner Amex. Wrong. “Pittman, who does MTV belong to?” He’s got this trick-question thing going with everyone in the room. Finally he says, “MTV is the color-TV phenomenon, you guys. If you are the kid on the block with the first color TV, all the other kids come to your house to watch it. Same with MTV. It’s that cool. It’s theirs, the kids’, it belongs to them. I came up with a campaign for a breakfast cereal called Maypo. We had sports stars like Mickey Mantle and Wilt Chamberlain saying, ‘I want my Maypo!’ This campaign is going to be a bunch of rock stars saying, ‘I want my MTV!’ Garland,” he goes, “can you get Mick Jagger to say that?” I go, “I think so.” He goes, “That’s who we got to get first. Mick Jagger is the most important rock star in the world. If we can get him to do it, the rest of them will be easy.” And I go, “I fucking love it.”

The others present were more cautious, but came around.

David Horowitz: The cable operators were so strong, you were warned not to go behind them to the public. That was a real no-no. They would break you if you did that. But it came to the point where we didn’t have a choice.

John Lack: We have this big powwow, and the question is “Do we go around the gatekeeper and go right to the customer?” ’Cause we knew this product was going to be hot with young people—we just had to get to them. But we couldn’t get to them without distribution, and, of course, these cable operators held the keys. After much agony, long hours of fighting, we decided to go for it.

Bob Pittman: This was a Hail Mary. ’Cause if it didn’t work, we were never going to make it.

The trick now was getting Jagger to agree.

Les Garland: We find out that Mick is touring in Paris and will see us. So we jump on a plane. It’s a gamble: we don’t know whether we are going to get Mick to do it or not. But we are in the hotel, ready to meet. Truth be told, I disappeared for a day and a half, and found a couple of women that were just so much fun. If I have the time, I will rock. Anyway, the phone call comes. I go to Mick’s room, and went into the rap: We were about to embark upon this campaign, and he being who he is, it was vitally important that he say yes to my request. Which is that he agrees to us shooting him the next day saying, “I want my MTV!” He says, “I don’t do commercials.” I say, “I prefer to look at it as more of an endorsement for a new phenomenon called music video. We just happen to be the only venue that plays them.” He goes, “It’s still a commercial.” I go, “If you were paid, does that change it?” And he goes, “Well …” So I say, “All right, Mick,” and I reach into my pocket, pull out a dollar bill, and lay it on the table. And I say, “Will you take it?” He starts laughing and says, “Garland, I’ll do it.” The next day, we do the shoot and then hightail it back to New York, where Sykes is, dialing in rock stars left and right. Pete Townshend and David Bowie and Pat Benatar and John Cougar—we have a bunch of them in the can. We had the campaign on TV within 14 days.

The impact of the $2 million ad blitz in March 1982 was instant and overwhelming.

Bob McGroarty: I got calls from cable operators saying, “Take those spots off the air! We are getting flooded with phone calls and it’s screwing up our business!” I said, “Oh, really?” and called Dale Pon and said, “Put more spots on.”

John Lack: We bought $300,000 worth of airtime in Denver, where TCI is, and we blew Denver away: “I want my MTV! I want my MTV!” The phones rang like it was an avalanche. After two weeks, Malone calls and says, “I give.”

Tom Freston: We’d go in and attack a town and we’d run like three or four weeks of this advertising and the phones would ring off the hook and every cable operator in the market would add the service. And we’d be off to another city. We were rolling across the country and adding a million subs a month. It was fantastic.

Les Garland: Before the campaign, we did a study of the target audience and found that the awareness factor—people who had seen MTV or heard of it—was just under 20 percent. Four weeks later, we do the same study. The recognition factor now is 89 percent.

The last bastion to fall was Time Inc.–owned Manhattan Cable.

Dale Pon: New York was hard. The “I Want My MTV” campaign would run periodically, but the guy who ran the system said, “The phone can ring all it wants. I don’t care. The other cable operators are just weak. I’m not going to be bullied or blackmailed. Don’t fuck with me. I’m not doing it.”

Jack Gault, president, Manhattan Cable: My 13-year-old son wanted his MTV. What teenage kid didn’t? But we clearly were the most important cable TV system in the country. I thought they should pay. They thought that was heresy. So the negotiation was protracted. Finally we got creative and came up with a deal where they would buy some of my unsold ad inventory.

To celebrate the deal, MTV executives hosted a party for cable operators at a tony Manhattan nightspot. To buck up the staff, which had been excluded, Garland came up with a counter.

Les Garland: I went to Pittman and said, “I want to do something really cool for the staff. Have a first-birthday party. Not real big.” He said, “Gar-man, neat idea, but we just can’t do it. Money is too tight. It wouldn’t look good corporately.” I’m pissed, so I get my department heads and said, “Guys, put together a party and don’t tell me anything.” One of them says, “Gar-man, where are we going to get the money?” I’m like, “Please, give me a break. Surely each of you can find a few thousand dollars in your budget and make it look like something else. I mean, we aren’t beginners here.” I start hearing rumblings in the hallways: This thing is going to be a blowout. I’m still playing dumb, but at some point they come to me and say, “Garland, we are really struggling for a theme.” I said, “What’s more fun than gambling?” They find some unbelievable location, and the night of the party I show up at 10:30, and the kids are having a ball. Everyone’s got a wad of fake money—my face is on it, it’s Garland money—and there are prizes—TVs and stereo systems and motorcycles and all kinds of shit—and everybody is getting hammered. “Speech, speech,” they are saying. I get up on the stage half snockered and go into my best Bob Pittman imitation. And who do I see in the audience? Bob Pittman. He says to me, “We’ll deal with this Monday.” All weekend I’m going, I’m outta here. Monday morning, I’m sitting in my office, and Dwight Tierney, who’s in charge of human relations, calls. I think, Oh, shit, here we go, they’re blowing me out. I say, “You want me to bring my lawyer?” He says, “What are you talking about? All we need to know is where you got the prizes. Other than that, no problem.” That’s why I love Pittman.

With MTV airing in New York and Los Angeles by the turn of the year, everyone was breathing relieved sighs—and encountering sudden celebrity.

Martha Quinn: J.J. and I were walking down 57th Street, and a homeless guy lying in a doorway looks up, and says, “Hey, aren’t you Martha Quinn?” We said, “Yeah, how’s it going?” We walk away and I say to J.J., “How’s that guy have cable?”

Jordan Rost: When I worked for NBC and wore my logo baseball cap, no one cared. I’d wear an MTV jacket, and I couldn’t get three blocks without being asked four times, “You really work for MTV?”

Gale Sparrow: When people like Elton John started calling to say, “Can I be a guest V.J.?,” you knew we were making it. Everyone wanted to come on board. People weren’t calling about their lower acts—they were calling about their main acts. It was like, “Do you have room for an interview?” I had a staff of eight, and we couldn’t even cover the calls. We were getting 250 a day.

Nick Rhodes, keyboardist, Duran Duran: We’d go over to their studio several times a week whenever we were in Manhattan. Andy Warhol was a friend of ours and we took him down there. He loved it. Just sat taking photographs the whole time of absolutely nothing. But Andy was thrilled to see what the MTV experience was all about.

Judy McGrath: We got Motörhead to tape an MTV I.D. At the shoot, Sykes was saying, “I want you to say, ‘Hi, I’m Lemmy from Motörhead, and you’re watching MTV.’ ” The camera rolled, and Lemmy said, “This is Motörhead, and if you don’t watch MTV, I’m coming to your house and rip up your lawn and tear your poodle’s head off.” We run this thing, and all of a sudden I am getting calls from Steve Tyler and Tina Turner saying, “Hey, I want to do one of those.” And I thought, You do?

MTV’s corporate parent, Warner Amex, meanwhile, was posting heavy losses, in part because the Movie Channel was taking a clobbering at the hands of Cinemax, a competing “flanker brand” recently released by HBO. Fed up, American Express persuaded Ross to sell most of the Movie Channel to Viacom, and ousted Warner Amex’s C.E.O. The new chief was Ronald Reagan’s transportation secretary Drew Lewis, who’d shown his tough-mindedness by firing the nation’s striking air-traffic controllers. The first casualty at MTV was Lack, who left in January 1983. McGroarty departed shortly thereafter. Though Schneider remained in his post, MTV’s master was now Bob Pittman.

Brian Diamond: Physically, Bob wasn’t around much, but everybody felt his presence. The running joke was that Bob would call and say, “Get the plants off the set.” Three days later: “Put the plants back on the set.” It was like, “Oh, my God, Big Brother’s watching. We can’t get away with anything anymore.” We all knew who was driving the ship.

Tom Freston: Bob made the old suits at Warner and Amex feel comfortable that they were in good hands with a smart guy who was ready to exploit popular culture in a smart way. He had a relentless focus on “What does the consumer really want? If we get into his head, everything else kind of comes together.”

Gale Sparrow: Pittman lost his eye when he was a child, and Garland lost his eye when he was at MTV because they sent him the wrong medication, and John Sykes had a sort of an astigmatism, though the rumor was that he would have knocked out both his eyes if he had to. One day, I came down with an eye inflammation. Pittman looked at me and said, “Gale, I always knew you were executive material.”

Fred Seibert: One night we are at a company retreat out at the end of Long Island, and eight or nine of us end up in a rental car. Everyone is sitting on someone else’s lap, including Bob, who’s in the backseat behind Dwight Tierney, who’s driving. It’s dark. There are no streetlights anywhere. Bob reaches up and puts his hands over Dwight’s eyes. “Keep driving,” he says. We’re all thinking, God, we are going to die. Bob goes, “Aw, we did this in Mississippi all the time.” The woman who is sitting next to me says, “That’s what I like about him. He’s fearless.”

Pittman would need courage to handle MTV’s finances. In two years on the air, the channel had racked up a reported $33.9 million in losses and was projected to lose $20 million more in 1983. Lewis had other ideas.

Bob Pittman: Drew Lewis took me out to lunch and said, “Bob, either you get the loss down to $12 million or we’re going to shut it down.” So we had to start whacking everything to make it happen.

Mark Booth: Penetration of cable was modest, ad sales were modest, expenses were high. Warner Amex was saying, “Either you crack the economics or you’re gone. We’re not the Salvation Army.”

Doug Herzog, director, MTV News: All of a sudden, every dime was being watched. The whole idea was to see what we can do for nothing.

David Hilton, head of affiliate sales and marketing: It went from being “Can we do this?” to “How can we make it profitable?”

To Pittman and Horowitz, it was evident that neither cost-cutting nor ad revenues would be sufficient to lift MTV from the red.

Bob Pittman: No one in the cable business had been successful being entirely advertiser-supported. If we were ever going to make any money, we had to get the cable operators to pay.

David Horowitz: That’s when it hit the fan. The attitude of the cable operators was that we were damned lucky they were letting us onto their systems.

Mark Booth: We went back and said, “This isn’t going to work out the way it’s been working. Here’s our new rate card—10 cents per home per month—and we will give you a much better deal now than if you wait.” The cable industry saw that if they wanted to have a more robust content community, they needed to re-distribute the wealth. We basically created a strategy that enabled everyone to win.

John Reardon, vice president, national accounts: Mark Booth and I walked out the door of a cable operator in Colorado after doing our first contract. And right there in the parking lot, we jumped up in the air and slapped hands, and said, “Jesus God, we are actually going to get money for this thing!”

While cable operators were having their arms twisted, MTV was coming under increasing fire for its nearly all-white playlist. The most vocal critic was “Slick” Rick James. After MTV passed on his “Super Freak” video, he publicly accused the channel of “taking black people back 400 years,” setting off a torrent of charge and countercharge.

John Sykes: Racism was the furthest thing from our minds. We were trying to build a very narrowly focused channel, just like radio. The problem was, we were the only game in town, so the media was expecting us to be like traditional TV and put on all things for all people. From everything we’d learned in radio, that didn’t work. No one from the country community was picketing out front, saying, “Why aren’t you playing country artists?”

Tom Freston: If you look at who was making rock music in those days, it was pretty much white boys with guitars. There were some black artists who got rotation on MTV, but not many, because there weren’t a lot of black artists playing rock ’n’ roll. When clips came in, the programming guys were a bit overly religious on the issue. The playlist was a lot stricter than it had to be, because we really didn’t have any competition out there.

Charles M. Young, writer, promotions and shows: I was coming home on the subway wearing my MTV jacket, and this black kid comes up to me, and he was so excited. He wanted to work at MTV; he just loved it. We got off at the same stop, and we talked about MTV all the way to my apartment. I went in feeling so rotten that there was no black music on MTV. I thought, God, this is completely unfair.

Carolyn Baker, director of talent acquisitions: MTV was supposed to be a white-boys’ channel, and it was really set in stone. I’m black, and Rick would talk to me about it, Stevie Wonder would, Teddy Pendergrass would, Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson would. But it was not a subject that I ever really talked about at MTV. But it did come up with Bob when he wouldn’t let me buy a long James Brown piece. He said, “My audience doesn’t think that rock ’n’ roll came from James Brown; they believe it came from the Beatles.”

J. J. Jackson: I was sent to cover a birthday party Bill Cosby was throwing for Miles Davis. We sit down and Miles looks me dead straight in the eyes and says, “Tell me, young man, how come MTV doesn’t play any black videos?” I said, “Well, at this point, our format is rock ’n’ roll, and Jimi Hendrix didn’t make any videos. We don’t play Elvis Presley, either, and some people consider him the father of rock ’n’ roll. Or Dwight Yoakam, or any of those people. Believe me, if I thought they weren’t playing black artists because they were black, there’s no way in hell I would be their patsy for that.” He looked at me for like 20 seconds—man, it felt like a lifetime—and said absolutely nothing. Finally, he went, “Very good, young man.”

Mark Goodman: People would say, “Pittman’s from the South. What do you expect?” But I bought the corporate line, which was MTV is like rock radio. Rock radio would not be playing the Temptations or James Brown. We play rock artists. Then Let’s Dance came out, and I sat down to interview David Bowie. He had a camera crew with him, and heavy executives were standing around, watching. I said, “Get ready, because I’ve got all the tough questions lined up for you.” David said, “Good, because I want to ask you some punishing questions.” I chuckled, not knowing what he had in store. After the interview, he asks me, “Why do you think MTV doesn’t play black music?” I said, “We try to play music for a particular type of demographic and genre.” He said, “What about all the black kids?” I said, “You got to talk to MTV about that.” I got hung out to dry.

Pittman refused to budge. Then, in January 1983, Michael Jackson released a single from his new album, Thriller. “Billie Jean,” an up-tempo pop tale of the travails brought on by a trumped-up paternity charge, bulleted onto the Billboard Hot 100. A video soon followed, but despite its quick climb to No. 1 and intensive lobbying from CBS Records, “Billie Jean” received no airplay on MTV. Why it was finally added to the channel’s rotation is hotly disputed.

David Benjamin, vice president for business affairs, CBS Records: I was sitting in my office, and Susan Blond, who was in charge of videos at Epic, came in, in tears. She says, “We just spent all this money on Michael Jackson’s video. It’s brilliant, but they won’t play it.” Immediately, I call Pittman; he’s in a meeting. Then I call Garland; he’s busy. Then I call Sykes; he picks up. “John,” I say, “the fickle finger of fate is pointed at you. I am now invoking the 24-hour kill clause in our contract. By tomorrow at this time I want every CBS video off MTV.” I walk to the other side of the floor to tell Walter Yetnikoff what I’ve done, and his secretary Bonnie is laughing. “What the fuck did you do? Pittman just called and he’s going crazy.” Walter waves me in, and he’s laughing, too. “David,” he says to me, “look who’s on the phone. Our good friend Bob Pittman.” “No kidding,” I say. “Yes,” Walter says. “He says that all we had to do was call and ask. Of course they would play the video. No problem.” “Gee, I’m sorry, Walter,” I say. “That’s O.K.,” Walter says. “But in future you just call up Bob. He’ll do whatever we want.”

Les Garland: “Billie Jean” came in, and it blew my mind. The whole staff flipped over it. I phoned Pittman, who was in California, and said, “Bob, I’m FedExing the most amazing video to you. Wait till you see it.” He calls the next day, and he’s like, “God, this is great.” I said, “There is no question here, is there?” He says, “You do what you want to do.” I said, “You know what I am going to do.” And he says, “Fine.” The problem was, we waited three or five days to put it on, ’cause of whatever, and someone misinterpreted it as us holding back. The next thing you know, this whole thing with CBS blows up. We’re looking at each other, saying, “Where did this thing come from?”

“Billie Jean” was followed by “Beat It,” and both were among the most popular videos in MTV history. Their repeated airing helped propel Thriller to sales of 800,000 per week, and prompted CBS Records to commission the title cut as the third video from the album. Directed by John Landis of Blues Brothers fame, “Thriller” ran an unprecedented 14 minutes and cost an equally unprecedented $1.1 million—more than 20 times the most expensive video to date. Yet another precedent was shattered when Pittman agreed to pay $250,000 for first-air rights, the expenditure disguised as a cost of a “making of” documentary. While shooting was in progress, Garland visited the set.

Les Garland: I’m invited to Michael’s trailer. I’m waiting in the living room when all of the sudden a pair of socks comes flying out from this dark room in the back and lands at my feet. His assistant says, “That means Michael is ready to see you.” So I pick up his socks and go back. He’s lying down and I sit and we talk for an hour. He said, “Garland, I just want to thank you so much for everything you’ve done through MTV to support my career.” I said, “Stop, man, I am the guy who should be saying ‘Thank you’ to you for making such great music for such great videos.” When “Thriller” came out, we’d play it two or three times a day. We also pre-promoted every time it was going to play, and every time it did, it spiked the ratings. That’s when we knew that event programming would work within the confines of what we were doing at MTV.

MTV, which had already made the careers of Culture Club, Cyndi Lauper, and Duran Duran, would fuel other made-for-video mega-stars, none brighter—or more controversial—than the Material Girl.

John Sykes: The first time I met Madonna was at Café Un Deux Trois on 44th Street. She was very quiet and very controlled and kind of was letting her attitude be known. Which was this kind of street-smart, tough woman who wanted to do business. She had like a Screaming Mimi’s kind of retro outfit on, a little veil over her face. She wanted to find out what we were doing and talk to us about her music. But she was very guarded and wasn’t going to offer her friendship that easily. Basically, she was setting her image with us that we were going to have to come to her. She knew exactly how to package herself, exactly how much to give each time, exactly how to make the look as important as the sound. She really represented, along with Michael Jackson, the beginning of a new video generation. A lot of artists that only cared about the look, or only cared about the sound, never made the transition and kind of went by the wayside. But she understood the balance.

Gale Sparrow: She had one video, a disco-like thing, called “Electric” something, and she asked if, as a favor, we’d play it late at night, so she could watch it herself. We weren’t sure, because it really wasn’t our format. But Garland said, “She’s so sexy, let’s just play it really late or early in the morning and Pittman will never know.” But Pittman did watch, and every now and then he’d call Garland and say, “Bud, what’s going on? You guys are getting out of line.” But the channel was looking nice, and Pittman let us do it. And, boy, did that favor pay off. Because her next video was—wow!—night-and-day better. We played the hell out of that. “Borderline” was next and Madonna was a star. That’s when everything started changing. It wasn’t just AOR music. It was a little more pop. The image became as important as the music.

Marcy Brafman: We fought about putting Madonna on. There was this feeling that she was too pop, too dance-music, and we weren’t about dance music. When her stuff took hold, it changed something in not a good way. It became more glitz and showbizzy. It was not that free, wildness-of-youth, born-to-raise-hell kind of rock ’n’ roll. It was engineered. It was entertainment.

Jeff Ayeroff, creative director, Warner bros. Records: Madonna was the first act I worked with at Warner, and I was wheeling and dealing with Sykes and Gale Sparrow, saying, “This girl is going to be the biggest star on MTV.” They got her right away, but they didn’t get her music right away, so they were sort of hesitant. We did a series of videos, and one of them—where she’s this street girl who gets picked up by the photographer and she spray-paints his car—started the phenomenon. They realized they had something that brings their audience to them. She was the right person, the right artist, the right product, at the right time. Madonna fed them, and they fed her. They went hand in hand together.

The success of Madonna and Michael Jackson sent video-production costs spiraling, enraging record-company executives and artists alike. The airwaves, meanwhile, were filling up with music-video shows, hoping to ape MTV’s exploding popularity. To stanch the competition on the one hand, and placate the record companies on the other, Pittman began offering labels payments for hot videos in return for “windows of exclusivity.” Under pressure from increasingly vocal interest groups, as well as image-nervous American Express, MTV also began cracking down harder on video content.

Stan Cornyn: We gave Madonna a video to do, and the cost was going to be $10,000. Then the producer says, “We want to shoot it in Italy, so it’s going to be 25.” Madonna is starring for us, so we come up with the 25. Well, the whole thing ends up at $100,000. At this point, the management of record companies are shitting cornerstone-size bricks.

Bob Summer: One video we did for George Michael was something in excess of a low-budget movie. The artists were demanding it, and if you didn’t have a video available at the time of launch, you weren’t competitive. It’s that simple. The all-powerful record companies found themselves in the position of being leveraged by the MTV gang.

Bob Krasnow, president, Elektra Records: We were spending $300,000 on a video more often than not. And I started seeing a very subtle change in the bands. All of the sudden, they were starting to realize that they couldn’t go out in this national format with bellies. They needed to take care of their whole appearance. They were getting slimmed down, more muscular. Appearance became important. People were realizing, “Hey, this is a professional business we’re in that’s grossing millions of dollars.” The whole mentality of how we approached our business was changing dramatically.

Billy Idol: You saw the big guns move in on MTV. Suddenly, you were competing on a level that was ridiculous. People like Michael Jackson moved everything up. Instead of $200,000, it was $2 million. It stopped the homegrown effect—it became video hell.

Stan Cornyn: MTV asking for exclusives was another astonishing, throw-them-out-of-the-office thing to do. The ballsiness of these guys. I sometimes thought that maybe that’s why Horowitz and Pittman wore glasses—so they wouldn’t get hit too badly.

Bob Krasnow: It was a small amount of money, but the point was, MTV was actually paying us, which was a lot better than us paying disc jockeys to play our records. This was a total turnabout. You had to grovel to get your records played on most radio stations, and here was this huge new idea—actually cultivating relationships.

Tim Newman, video director for ZZ Top: It pissed everybody off. The labels had a chance to encourage competition. Instead, they delivered themselves into the hands of MTV, which was a winner. It changed the whole game.

Jack Schneider: There was one Mick Jagger thing, where you opened a refrigerator and there were decapitated heads. I?said, “What? I can’t put that on the air.” “Well, you must,” I was told, “because if you don’t, Mick said he’s never going to give us anything again.” “In a pig’s ass,” I said. “Mick will give us anything we want, because we sell records.”

Jo Bergman, video-department head, Warner Bros. Records: Anything that Standards and Practices decided was a little too risqué, had too much flesh, would get kicked back for recut. You had to go frame by frame because somebody thought they saw the shadow of a nipple. There was crying in the editing rooms. Tempers were raw.

Billy Idol: Pressure groups started to look in on what you were doing, and say, “Oh, you offended women’s liberation,” or whatever. In the beginning, you could have a lighted cross behind you, and people didn’t think you were trying to be the Ku Klux Klan. It wasn’t being taken quite so seriously. Now MTV wanted to control more and more what you said. You were getting, “People should do this in videos, they shouldn’t do that.”

More changes were in the offing, after MTV and Nickelodeon were listed as a publicly traded company, MTV Networks Inc., in the summer of 1984, with Warner Amex retaining a controlling interest. The first alteration was the removal of Jack Schneider, and the naming of David Horowitz as president and C.E.O. A move that caused far more internal consternation was the lopsided award of stock options. Corporate behavior was now the order of the day.

Chip Rachlin, director of long-form acquisitions: Bob got 100,000 shares, vice presidents and above 10,000 shares, and then it dropped for everybody else to 25 shares for every year of service. When you’ve got people in their 20s and early 30s really into what they are doing, not looking at the clock and giving you everything they’ve got—I felt that didn’t translate.

Dom Fioravanti: Going public made you realize that MTV was more than just fun—it was a big-money game. There was intense pressure every day: how we spent and managed our money; issues of ratings and demographics; how we were going to hit certain targets in order to satisfy the financial community. The ad-sales people, of course, were always interested in making money. But the programming people—it was difficult to get them to recognize that a corner had been turned, and that this was now a business, which needed to go in some direction other than just plain fun. That was my mission from Bob Pittman. I was supposed to be the one to provide maturity to the playpen, so to speak. It was almost sad, because it had started off in a very innocent way—all these young kids, and all they wanted to do was create art and participate in this incredible phenomenon. But when the money began to flow, it went 180 degrees in the other direction. This was the rock ’n’ roll generation grown up.

Marcy Brafman: People were jockeying for positions and power. It was as if suddenly there was a realization that there was something to protect. The minute that happens, it kills the entrepreneurial edge that drives something. I noticed the change in lots of ways: the number of people who had to approve creative; the chances we were willing to take with the statements we made; the second-guessing on almost everything. They wanted everything to be corporate. It stopped wanting to be new.

Andy Setos: Everything started to get out of hand when we made money. Because then everyone realized that whoever holds on the hardest gets a lot. That’s when it got dark—when the building was over, more or less, and we were much more into a maintenance mode.

Dwight Tierney, head of personnel, wasec: I was in a meeting one day with an executive who professed long and loudly—more than any other exec in the company—about the importance of decency to people, how people were the most important thing and blah, blah, blah. And I said to her, “Look, I’ve got to talk to you about one of your execs. She humiliated a new hire in the hallway, screamed and yelled at her in public. It was absolutely appalling.” And this executive said to me, “Yeah, but did you see the numbers she brought in?” I thought to myself, Things are really changing.

Gale Sparrow: My old boss, the nicest guy in the world, learned he’d been fired when he came to work and found that all his belongings had been moved out of his office. My new boss calls me in and says, “Gale, you’ve been way too kind to these record company people. We have to play hardball. We want only the biggest acts, and we aren’t going to play anymore of this little bullshit stuff.” I said, “This ‘little bullshit stuff’ put us on the map.” I think about it for a week, decide I’m not buying it, that it’s time to leave. I tell my boss and he says, “You must have PMS.” I say, “I’m outta here.”

Alan Hunter: We’d been loose as a goose for three or four years. There was nothing I couldn’t do, no irreverence I couldn’t be involved in. If I wanted to pick my nose on-air, I knew I could. Then one day we found we couldn’t be little kids anymore. Bob wanted more respectability for the channel. So we were sent to this communication lady, who’d coached George Bush and Dan Rather and heavy-duty people like that. We’d sit down with her and go through our little tapes. I might have made some offhand remark, like “Check that out.” She’d stop the tape and go, “Alan, we need to work on your full-sentence skills.” We did this for an hour every week for six months. It drove you crazy.

Jo Bergman: Periodically MTV would have meetings to pump you up about the new acts you were coming out with. Somehow, I got the wrong invitation—not to the label pump-you-up meeting, but to the advertiser pump-you-up meeting. It had nothing to do with music. The focus was on “You should be buying time with us, because we are going to deliver the demographics, whatever it takes.” That was whipping a Band-Aid from the eyes. We felt we were inventing something new. It turned out we were actually making commercials.

But MTV could still put on a great show. That was demonstrated in September 1984, when, in an extravaganza featuring Tina Turner, Huey Lewis and the News, Rod Stewart, and channel queen Madonna, the first annual MTV Video Music Awards were staged at Radio City Music Hall.

Les Garland: Up until a week before the show, Madonna didn’t know what kind of a set she wanted. But one day she calls and goes, “Garland, I’ve got it. I want a tiger. I want to lay around and sing ‘Like a Virgin’ to the tiger.” I said, “I don’t think we can do that at Radio City. If that tiger went nuts and ate Walter Yetnikoff, I’ve got a fucking problem.” She died laughing, and I said I’d check it out. I did, and I call her back and say they are not going to let us have any tigers at Radio City. So she comes back with a 17-foot cake we only had five days to build for her. It threw us overbudget, that frigging cake. At rehearsal, she’s climbing up the cake and has on this wedding thing with nothing else on underneath. I’m standing below her and looking up, and going, “Hmmm … ” She looks down and says, “How does my butt look?” “Looks good from down here,” I say.

Andy Setos: Midtown Manhattan was MTV for that evening. There were limos up and down Sixth Avenue—it was just un-freaking-believable. It was the ticket in town.

Beverly Weinstein: Everybody wanted to go: every advertiser in the world, every client in the world. I was thinking, Whoa, look at this. We are a big deal.

John Reardon: All the cable operators are in their tuxedos, and their wives are dressed to the nines, and they’re not believing what they’re seeing: Mayor Koch with a gloved hand, acting like Michael Jackson, Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd in their space suits. My wife and I are sitting in the fourth row, pinching ourselves. Then Madonna comes out in a wedding dress with a jeweled boy toy belt and lies down on the stage and is humpin’ up and down, singing “Like a Virgin.” I’m saying to myself, Oh my God, what are the cable operators thinking? But I didn’t lose a single customer. They talked about that night forever.