Justify My Love

 August 3, 1991, TV Guide put Madonna on the cover for its cover story "The MTV Revolution: How It's Changed the Face of TV," marking the network's tenth anniversary.

MTV launched August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern, airing the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" as its first video, and had grown from a niche cable experiment into a dominant cultural force reshaping how music was marketed and consumed. Madonna had become one of the artists most closely identified with the network, delivering a career-defining performance of "Like a Virgin" at the very first MTV Video Music Awards in 1984 and winning the network's Video Vanguard Award in 1986. Just months before this issue, MTV had banned her "Justify My Love" video in December 1990 over its explicit content, and her documentary Truth or Dare had hit theaters that May, keeping her squarely at the center of the channel's ongoing cultural conversation.

The issue's report looked back at how thoroughly the channel had transformed the television landscape in just a decade, from launching the careers of VJs to turning music videos into an art form of their own.