Loverboy - Queen Of The Broken Hearts

What this video is

Released in September 1983, 'Queen Of The Broken Hearts' arrived at the height of MTV's formative period, when the two-year-old network was reshaping how rock music was consumed and marketed in North America. Loverboy, a Canadian band signed to Columbia Records, used the video format aggressively to penetrate the US market, and this video's concurrent MTV viewer contest was itself a direct product of the symbiotic…

Why it matters

As an AOR/arena rock video from 1983, this clip represents the genre at a pivotal commercial moment: fast editing rhythms, location-based storytelling, and warm saturated color palettes were becoming codified conventions. The video's MTV contest integration also marks an early documented instance…

The director

Martin Kahan (April 17, 1947 – July 18, 2021) was a New York-born music video director who launched his career shooting live promo clips for Rush ('Tom Sawyer,' 'Freewill,' 'Limelight') before MTV's launch. He became a house director for Columbia Records in…