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SO WHAT EXATLY DOES THE ‘M’ STAND FOR?

Written Thursday, February 23 by J.R.Knight | E-mail this post

I wanted to post something terrible that happened to me last night. Something that shook me to my very core. Something from which I may never recover. I watched MTV.

Let me preface by saying that I don’t have cable. Mostly because I would watch anything about World War 2, the occult, sea monsters or stories of the bible, which is to say I would never not be watching television. Okay, so that’s a bit of a pussy answer, like when people say they’d never try heroine because “I’d like it too much!!” Whatever dude, you haven’t tried heroine because you’re a pussy and are afraid of overdosing or selling your hi-fi. That’s legitimate. So maybe I don’t have cable because I don’t want to have another bill coming to my apartment every month.

Whatever! Let’s stay focused. What I mean to say is that I haven’t seen MTV in a while. I think the last thing I saw was Total Request Live which I remember thinking was the stupidest think I’d seen that day and was a bit like the Roman coliseums for people who say “Oh My God” a lot. It represented, for me, a great slide in a network that had once, long ago, been cooler than me. More After The Jump!!

The first time I saw MTV was early in the 80s. My dad was a young professor at Pratt and he was fond of taking me out to student’s apartments when he went to hang out. So one day I’m sitting bored in some hipster’s two bedroom apartment somewhere in Brooklyn and I’m given permission to go watch the only TV in the house, in the bedroom. In retrospect this was most likely because they were all going to smoke pot or something but I was like 6 so what did I know?

The TV was a tiny black and white one that got shitty reception but somewhere on the UHF channels I found MTV. I was just starting to thing music was cool (my did listened to Talking Heads, Nina Simone and Grandmaster Flash, so that was going to work out for me) so I had heard of Music Television. Now, here is was, and it was great. There was some young kid with a microphone and a bad haircut in some shitty neighborhood in the city talking and I don’t remember what he said but I remember that he was cool. Later they did a segment from someone’s apartment (I don’t think they had a studio yet). I don’t remember any of the video I saw but somewhere deep inside my brain does.

Since then MTV has gone through many cycles. There were these, what we’ll call Gonzo Days; no studio, fast and loose and on air personalities who just happened to be at the show last night( Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson and Martha Quinn). Then there were The Golden Years, when basic cable began to appear. Like I said my Dad was a hipster art professor so we barely had a TV but when I went down to rural Georgia to visit my Dad’s family I got to see the goods. My cousin and I would sit up all night watching MTV and You Can’t Do That On Television and drinks suicides (that’s where you take all the soda in the house and mix it into one glass). It’s the birth of the VJ.

This worked out well for a while and then came a show called Remote Control. I’m not going to get into the whole thing, read the link if you don’t know what it is but this was the first none music programming on MTV. We’ll call these The Division Years. Division because this was when they started putting video into categories and shows. Yo MTV Raps, 120 Minutes and Headbanger’s Ball and Liquid Television. This is the period during which I did most of my MTV viewing because it was during this period that we got cable. I have fond memories of this period, although in retrospect it was not the channels golden age.

This period ended when Kurt Cobain died. Let me explain. Viacom already owned MTV at the time. Back then Viacom was a shitty little cable provider, but they were eating up cable channels like chicken tacos. It was around 92 – 93 (I’m not going to do the research) that Blockbuster video was bought into the Viacom omniverse and with that the president of Blockbuster (a Christian Conservative) got a seat on the board. So here comes grunge, and for the first time the channel is a little behind the curve of their own demographic. During this period, a golden age in music for me personally, MTV could be either way on (Nirvana’s MTV unplugged) or way off (the first appearance of the MTV beach house) When Kurt died the network wasn’t sorry to see him go and dumped the legitimate grunge scene like a bad kisser and moved on to bands like Soul Asylum and The Spin Doctors, ugh! I call this The Beach House Years. Personally I call it the winter of my discontent but whatever. These were the days of Road Rules and The Real World and Bill Bellamy at the beach house while poor Matt Pinfield, hired by MTV as their resident musicocologist, sat uncomfortably in the beach house’s basement and introduced Snoop Doggy Dogg videos.

This period ended when MTV held there I Wanna Be A VJ” Contest and that FUCKING RETARD Jesse Camp entered my life. That was the finally straw and I stopped watching MTV on purpose. Jesse Camp heralded in The Times Square Years, when Total Request Live and Carson Daly would dominate the teen-scene landscape. Brittany and Justine and N’Sync and Ninety-fucking-eight Degrees and whoever. I don’t want to talk about this. These were dark days for the Empire.

Now the channel is in what I would call it’s Our Brand Is Youth Years. I don’t watch except when I’m visiting my mom and flipping through with my kid sister and we land on something. Diana, my sister, is now 18 and if I ask she can explain the difference between one group of obnoxious 15 year-olds and another. She doesn’t like the shows but she knows all their names. I guess if you’re a senior in High School you have to.

Which brings us to what I saw last night. (You didn’t think I was going to get to it, did you?) Last night I saw a show that I can only describe as committee thinking at it’s worst. A show that seems to have been produced by coming up with a name and than designing a show that vaguely fits. The show is called Date My Mom.

The principle is so simple a monkey could have come up with it. Send a sort of homely guy out on three dates with three mothers, one at a time. All in a sad attempt for the mother’s to convince this sap to date their homely daughters. If it was really as good as I just described it would be postmodern masterpiece, sadly, it’s not. During the shows 30 minutes I was force to watch someone’s fat mom blow on the business end of a saxophone, Someone else’s mom give a teenage boy a “booty dance” and listen to this retard kid say things like. “A thong? That’s sexy!”

The dates themselves are well scripted and time and have the same train wreak appeal of amateur pornography (now I touch you there, then I stand here. Now I sayh something. Now you say something). Fucking great, After each date we get two minutes of pointless scripted banter between mother and daughter as the mother recaps WHAT WE JUST SAW and the daughters say things that bloggers say ironically. I don’t think I had ever heard anyone say “OMG” before without it being a joke.

At the end there is a scripted showdown with the sort of witty banter that only a 26 year-old Tulane graduate associate producer could have written. Maybe this was the better of two evils; in an unscripted moment genius boy says, “My name is Chuck and I’m ready to fuck”, when describing one of the girls. Okay, let’s stick with the Tulane grad’s stuff. After this unintense and totally anti-climatic selection process the mother, daughter and boyfriend run hand and hand along a beach in what can only be described as gay in the worst possible sense of the word.

Then the loser girls get to give their little thing and the fat girl who posts half nude photos of herself on the internet calls the winner a whore and says to the boy “You could have had allllll this!” Even the other girl shivers. In the shows most telling moment Romeo is given a chance at the show’s end to woo his new love with some words of romance. He settles on “You dancing in your thong is sexy, you think I could see some of that?” You know what buddy? I think you can.

So is this it? Is there no place for counter culture kids on TV anymore? When I was in high school even the square kids wore “Why Be Normal?” t-shirts and listened to nirvana. The freaks like me were forced to listen to ever more obscure bands and tune into college radio stations on Friday night joyrides. We thought it was the worst thing that ever happened. A friend of mine made a t-shirt that read: “The squares stole our bands”. In retrospect we were wrong. The shirt should have read: “The old folks are stealing our channel.”

3 Responses to “SO WHAT EXATLY DOES THE ‘M’ STAND FOR?”

Anonymous on 5:04 PM

Growing up, I had to mooch MTV off my friends because their parents had cable and my parents did not. The very first thing I saw was a video (which is unheard of now). Luckily for me, it was not just any video. It was THE video, Thriller.

Hey, if you're going to remember something when you're a few days away from 4, it might as well be when Michael Jackson was actually trying for creepy.

Years passed and I began to realise MTV was starting to cater to actual high school cliques. You call this time 'The Division Years'. Pretty much TV imitating life.

Then Grunge happened and my clique finally had a voice. Yay team! Those are my favourite MTV memories. Still, by then The Real World sucked a lot of my time. I'm pretty sure this still catered to my high school clique because these people (whiny and self-important as they may have been) had no fracking clue. And they bitched about this constantly. Of course that appealed to the teenaged me. I was all about not having a fracking clue.

Anyway, I'm happy that MTV moved on to other things after 1994. Why? I don't want my music taste fed to me by TV. It's fun listening to college radio, it's fun hunting down music, and it's one less thing given over to sloth. Look, I have nothing against the slovenly...it's just not something that should be applied to music.

My parents (God bless 'em) still do not have cable. Neither did I until I got it for free with my apartment when I moved to New York. By then MTV had already become the Reality TV attention whore it is today. I'm not going to lie. I eat some of that stuff up. It is just too damned entertaining.

Holy hell! This is a long fracking comment! My apologies. Ummm...to sum up:

1. I no longer have cable. I just download the stuff I want to lock myself in a room with and watch in secret.

2. When I had a CD player in my car, it was always 1992.

3. Date My Mom is abysmal, but not good abysmal. There's a difference.
Anonymous on 8:29 PM

I DO have cable (DTV actually with a DVR, because Im a fag and can't miss the OC, EVER) and I have to say, a couple years ago there was a very glimmer of hope called MTV2. It wasn't on standard cable, and really high up in the crap channels like "Discovery Wings Pre WWI Latino". I checked it out when it got on DTV a few years ago, and I was amazed. I know that doesn't take a lot, but Im serous, it was like nothing i had seen since i was 14. It wasn't the same cycle of 10 videos repeated, it was a meandering collection of videos-past and present. it had no (he whose name i will not mention but initials are Carson Daly) banter-usually no VJ at all actually. If it did it was low budget and on location at a billiards hall and and the guy would talk about the band that just played, with NO quips. Any even when the VJ showed up it was like once an hour. Yes the "low-budget" thing was conscience and a bit forced and not inspired via necessity but i didn't care. THEY WERE PLAYING FUCKING MUSIC. And the best thing was that the music selection, at first which seemed random, was ACTUALLY well thought out. Someone wasn't just pressing play. (i dont remember a lot of examples of this, but one time i recall being impressed by a Cornershop song (i believe) with the words "dead leaves" mentioned. The next song was "Dead leaves on the dirty ground" by the white stripes, followed by an old performance of MC5, who came from Detroit, home of the WS. Yes i know not brilliant, but, for an MTV network in the heyday of TRL?!?!? That was kinda mind-blowing. And, get this...no commercials. Yes, i said it.

Anyway, needless to say, that lasted about 6 months. DTV started getting a huge install base, and MTV started revamping (i.e.: shitting on the ground, bending over and licking it up.) It started playing re-runs of its reality tv programs, top 20 rock/rap/rock-rap countdowns, and the same 20 videos. And ofcourse i stopped keeping it on. But then it got even worse. About a year a go had a major relaunch, and decided to stop playing almost ANY music. (sound familiar?) I just checked my DTV guide for MTV2 for the evening:

1 hour of "high school stories"
1 hour of "Wild Boyz"
1 hour of "HipHop countdown"
1 hour of "Viva laBam"
1 hour of "Wild Boyz"

Im not making that up, go check. Anyway the only conclusion i can draw is that videos just dont get ratings anymore. Why wait for a great video come on when u can go and download it? And Steph's right, with TV in it's current abysmal media conglomerate dominated state, is this where we want to get our music from? Or News, or History?

Porn is ok though.
Anonymous on 12:41 PM

I was once working on a job for Clearom and had to watch every episode of Viva La Bam and Wild Boyz and I can say without a doubt that they both suck.

As far as force feeding music tastes - I agree, the last thing I need is Viacom telling me what to listen to - on the other hand, is how much better is The Real World?