"Girls" by Dwight Twilley

1984 / #16

Rate Your Music score: 3.24 out of 5!

I could never understand people who railed against MTV but tolerated radio stations that played much of the same music.

In 1984, that seemed to include most adults. It seemed like most of the rest were adults in my school district who shunned radio too. Any school employee who allowed MTV was downright anarchist by the school district's standards.

Something funny happened once in 5th grade. (Really? No way!) Our class was working in the school library, when the librarian turned on MTV for us to watch. Gasp! How subversive! My main teacher never permitted anything even close to that. She didn't even allow kids to dance to an Andy Gibb record or bring in those Song Hits magazines that were full of song lyrics. The librarian seemed radical compared to her.

We all enjoyed having MTV on while we studied. These days, when grownups say something is good or bad, kids snap into line, and they don't dare fight back. It's disgusting. But in my day, kids who liked MTV liked it even more when adults said it was bad.

But one video was too much even for the beloved librarian: "Girls" by Dwight Twilley.

Come on! The video wasn't that bad! If it was that "dirty", MTV never would have shown it right in the middle of the day. I don't think MTV has ever broadcast porn.

We were all laughing at the video as the librarian approached the TV. When she shut the TV off, everyone groaned.

One evening not long after that was our class play. The only thing I remember about the play itself was that students who acted in it wore giant paper cutouts of pennies. The librarian also spoke to the audience, and some of us said something about the Dwight Twilley incident at the end of her speech. This was the same play where we had refreshments afterwards and a student grabbed armloads of cookies and dropped them everywhere. The next day, our teacher famously lectured him about it: "You were greedy, you were wasteful, you were obnoxious."

MTV was a lightning rod for controversy for no apparent reason back then. It was the most popular cable TV channel in America, yet motel cable systems never carried it. They finally started carrying it when it became less popular. Today, there's a zillion cable channels, but I don't know of any for music videos. There's a business opportunity right there.

At least the school library subscribed to Song Hits.