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I Don't Want My MTV |
September 2002
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Who Killed the Video Star?
There is a new definition of middle age that merits sharing. Middle age is being old enough to remember when MTV played music videos. This isn't a rant about how things were greater when I was young -- frankly, Reagan's America and Thatcher's Britain were rather scary places. But MTV is one thing that really fell apart.
The shame is I can remember what caused MTV to fall in the bog. It happened when they began showing a brilliant UK comedy called the Young Ones. The sitcom featured a house of four college students (Rik, Vyvyan, Mike and Neil) set in a mild state of anarchy. Plus a band would play at some stage in the show (Madness twice, Amazulu, Nine Below Zero, whatever happened to them?). And the programming wizrds decided that the videos were less important than "Youth Culture."
So, now there are teen soap operas (The Real World, in which no one must pay rent or deal with vermin in their bedrooms) and documentaries about the home of the latest flash in the pan (MTV Cribs).
The most painful part of all of this is that my son has come to know Ozzy Osbourne more as a befuddled TV father (The Osbournes) than the lead singer from Black Sabbath. I now understand how the children of the 60s felt when their kids asked what band Paul McCartney was in before Wings.
I want to say that the videos are worse and that's why the other things have entered in. But the video as an art form has progressed (no more bands playing with little else going on), and frankly, some are quite sharp. Instead what has happened to MTV is what happened to hip hop, punk, and metal. The posers who want to go to parties and say "I work at MTV" are running the show instead to the people who want to play with the format.
All work and no play has made MTV a dull thing to watch.