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MTV Unplugged… Literally
“Its day came, its day passed, and now it’s time to move on.”
“Its day came, its day passed, and now it’s time to move on.”
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6 comments
MTV was made for the GenX/Millennial generations. Not sure which boomers you’re talking about, but this is a crap article.
Dude, MTV started in 1981 and stopped being worth watching long about 1995ish (Carson Daly was the beginning of the end). The crap they played from 1995-2000 wasn’t music and it wasn’t funny or interesting, then they got into “social change” only to find out that nobody cared.
These columns are starting to grow on me. If you ever want to name your column you could call it “Get Off My Damn Lawn!”
MTV died at the advent of file sharing which started in earnest in the 90s, then again after the rise of YouTube in the 2000s. I mean really, I remember in 99 my preferred file sharing program (not Napster) had multiple petabytes of all sorts of media – music, TV shows, movies, etc – which is insane considering even the idea of a terabyte of storage on your personal computer felt like a pipe dream at the time. YouTube really drove it home though – now you can look for the specific music videos you want to see, on demand, without having to expose yourself to potential viruses.
Streaming media services are honestly just another box of nails that can’t even be driven into the twice buried and vaulted coffin. Listening to Taylor Swift on Pandora doesn’t really affect whether or not people are watching whatever iteration of Teen Mom is on now. Reality TV shows being old, boring, uncreative, lowest common denominator schlock is doing that all on its own.
Interesting article and the comments are all good, leaving me little to say except that the Boomers were mainly the parents when MTV came out. In 1982 I was 14 and I am an older Gen X. My parents were in their thirties and were still young Boomers.
I remember when my grandmother and dad got cable in the early 80’s. I don’t think MTV had been around long, maybe a month at most, at the time. On frequent visits to their house, after each had retired for the night, I was drawn to MTV and several like channels. On a weekend, there might have been as many as four stations carrying non-stop music videos. I recall one program, possibly on a Turner Network channel, called “Radio 1990”. I would channel surf using the wired remote/channel selector provided by the cable company. It was a smorgasbord of videos, some great, some okay, and some that sucked. I could easily sit there looking for my favorite videos until daylight. As time went on, the competing video programs fell by the wayside, but MTV was still there.
The VJ’s noted in the article had occasional interesting music news, and later on, who could forget Downtown Julie Brown? MTV began circling the bowl when they went from an all video and music news format to retarded game shows like “Remote Control” and later, even more retarded programming like “Road Rules”. Sadly, like a cancer, this type programming just expanded on the channel. By the 90’s, it was rare to catch any of the old video programming that MTV launched with, so VH-1 stepped in to fill that gap.
I recall thinking MTV had redeemed itself by bringing us “Beavis and Butthead”. I couldn’t wait to get off from work in 1994 and get home to watch them. They were awesome. When Mike Judge decided to stop doing Beavis and Butthead and created King Of The Hill, I was destroyed. I refused to watch KOTH as I blamed it for Beavis and Butthead’s untimely exit from the stage.
Later on, MTV again redeemed itself with “Jackass”. The antics of the Jackass crew were a source of non-stop laughter in a world that seemed to be losing its sense of humour.
Today, I haven’t watched MTV in years. I haven’t had cable in years. As I have told friends, if I won a few hundred million dollars, I would not have cable in my home. It just isn’t worth the drama and bullshit. They get you in with low rates, and before you know it, you are paying $100, $150, or more per month, and those aren’t even your premium packages. Switch to another company when you finally realize how badly you are being raped by your current company and they do the same thing. It never ends. The last time I paid for cable, in the late 2,000’s, after about 1AM, there was nothing on but endless, stupid, infomercials. Like so many things, cable programming started out great, and over time went to shit. When my grandmother got it in the early 80’s, thirty or so bucks a month got you some really good channels and programming. Most of it was “commercial free” save for the too-frequent self-promoting ads that each channel used to keep you aware of their offerings. Twenty-five or so years later, it was almost nothing but commercials, THAT YOU HAVE TO PAY TO FREAKIN WATCH!!!! No, if I were a multi-millionaire, I would have over-the-air TV with a great antenna setup.
Still, I will never be able to view the MTV astronaut logo without in my mind, hearing that iconic guitar and drum riff in my head that I watched so many times over the years.