​New Wave pioneers The Human League are playing at the Best Buy Theater this Saturday, and Sound of the City is giving away a pair of tickets—plus a $100 gift certificate to the "music-inspired menswear shop" Any Old Iron—to one lucky person. (Two almost-as-lucky runners-up will receive a copy of the band's new album, Credo.) To enter, just like us on Facebook via the handy widget embedded below before Thursday, September 22, at 5 p.m. ET. And while you're there, why not enjoy two videos from the band, one of the new track "Never Let Me Go" and one of the classic sleeper hit "The Lebanon"?

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​What was the first rock and roll song? Ask music historians and you'll get a range of '40s and early '50 candidates, from "Good Rockin' Tonight" to "Rocket 88."

Ah, but when did the Rock Era begin? That's easier. Everybody knows that Bill Haley and His Comets' rendition of "Rock Around the Clock" was America's first-ever No. 1 rock and roll song, topping the Billboard charts in the summer of 1955 and launching the Rock Era as we know it. Occasionally, musical epochs can be demarcated easily, with a bright temporal line.

So it goes with the era of the music video. The promotional-music-clip format is more than a half-century old, dating to the 1940s and raised to a high-pop-art form by such pre-'80s acts as the Beatles and Queen, among others.

But the music video era, better known as the MTV Era, began unequivocally 30 years ago this weekend—on August 1, 1981, the day Music Television went live on cable TV. The No. 1 song on Billboard's Hot 100 that week was "Jessie's Girl," by a guy so telegenic he was crossing over from a soap opera: General Hospital's Rick Springfield. Appropriately, "Jessie's Girl" came packaged with a fairly slick (for its day) music video.

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Martin Rushent, the British music producer who worked with the likes of the Stranglers, XTC, and the Buzzcocks, passed away on Saturday. Rushent's watershed moment likely came when he produced the Human League's Dare, which spawned the still-pretty-inescapable "Don't You Want Me" (above); this 2010 interview about the genesis of that track is a pretty great read (apparently Human League lead singer Phil Oakey's silky voice sounded especially great when recorded in the bathroom; "you get a sort of live, boxy resonance" in the loo thanks to all that tile, Rushent noted). Friend of SOTC Ned Raggett has collected YouTube clips of Rushent's other production credits, including the Go-Go's "Turn To You" (he produced their album Talk Show, which also includes the sterling "Head Over Heels") and Altered Images' "Happy Birthday." Rushent was 63.