This year marks the 25th anniversary of MTV, the revolutionary channel that helped launch the careers of hundreds of vapid braying airheads and systematically ruined America. Let's all take a moment to congratulate them on this milestone.
MTV began as a simple idea. Put music to a kind of freeform movie - a music video - and have them be shown in succession with the help of an on-air VJ (video jockey). It was basically radio with a visual element. And that's a pretty cool idea. I'm all for movies, I'm all for music. MTV, in 1981, sign me right the hell up. (Well, I wasn't alive, but if I was). Unfortunately, over time, as money and marketing consumed the network this premise was completely abandoned. Today, in 2006, I would pay cash money to someone who can find me a good 15 minutes of full music videos on MTV. At this point, even MTV2 is devoid of any music videos and only plays reruns of "Beavis and Butthead" and derivatives of "Jackass."
I remember back in the day - let's say the era spanning from 1993 to 1996 - when MTV was just the absolute shit. Not "shit" like it is now, but "THE shit." They were just past their ten year anniversary and approaching their 15th. The aforementioned "Beavis and Butthead" was making a whole ton of waves in the media when idiots copied what they saw on TV (and this was also repeated by the aforementioned Jackasses of "Jackass"). The MTV beach house, the mighty MTV beachhouse Tiki God (anyone remember him?), "Headbanger's Ball," The 10 spot, "The State," "The Brothers Grunt" (who even remembers that show besides me?), Jenny McCarthy and Chris Hardwick flirting it up on "Singled Out," and fucking MTV's Oddities starring "The Maxx" and "The Head." It was violent, it was loud, it was sexy, and it was fucked up. THAT is what MTV meant to me as a kid. This taboo network that, when I was nine or ten, was what I immediately put on when the parents went to bed and the remote was all mine.
This was the era of grunge, the era of Generation X, a time when low-budget indie movies called "Slacker" or "Clerks" were coming out and advertising the shiftless lazy masses that wanted to say a big fat 'fuck you' to everything and everyone that expected them to "make something of themselves." MTV was the counter-culture and it was fucking great. I remember staying up late one summer to catch Prodigy's video for "Smack My Bitch Up," which was only aired after 1 am due to the excessive violence, drugs, and nudity it contained. Yeah, MTV played videos back then. And they were starting to do more shows and less music, but it was fine. Most of them still revolved around music anyway. "Beavis and Butthead" was more or less all about mocking bad videos, aside from the whole frog baseball thing. But for anyone with eyes still reading what I have to say on this foresaken blog, I can tell you the very moment, the very day, that the MTV I knew and loved so much, died.
September 14th, 1998
I was but a starting freshman in high school, filled with dread and anticipation over four years that might be hellish and scar me for life (they were and they did). And to coincide with my change of life, one of my favorite networks was about to have a change of its own.
On that fateful September day, they premiered a show called "Total Request Live."
Enter Carson Daly. Enter Britney Spears. Enter NSync and the Backstreet Boys and fucking 98 Degrees and 5ive and every other idiotic boy band. Enter Avril Lavigne and (even though I like them) blink-182. The new audience wasn't that generation x slackerdom that I as a pre-teen so desperately wanted to identify with. No, it was teeny-bopping middle America being pandered to by blonde-haired blue-eyed sirens singing about how they're not that innocent and waving bye, bye, bye. Jump ahead eight years and see the fucking difference MTV made. There are preteen girls out there wearing shirts that say "I faked it." and dressing like whores to be like their precious MTV role models. Fucking disgraceful...
I'm not trying to say that MTV was a positive role model for anyone in the pre-TRL days; like I said, idiots were copying Beavis and Butthead all the time. But truth be told, I'd much rather my kids - should I one day seed them - copy Beavis and Butthead than Paris Hilton and Jessica Simpson. At least Beavis and Butthead blew stuff up, they didn't just act like spoiled brat retards.
Oh well, I've long accepted that my MTV is long gone and recognize the fact that my bitching about this makes me feel like an old man. "In my day," etc... All I can do now is listen to Nirvana, Rage Against the Machine, or Soundgarden, watch my battered old VHS tapes of "The Maxx" and "the State" and remember that once, a long time ago, I was witness to something extraordinary. Maybe it's my beloved Gen-X slackers that are now parents and just don't care that their kids are watching mindless pablum.
Good luck on the next 25 years, MTV. I don't think you can mess society up any more than you already have, so there's the silver lining. That and "Pimp My Ride." I love that show.
