When was the last time that Mtv really mattered? For me it would have been the Jackass years. That was the last time that I watched Mtv with regularity. That was the last time I think that network was truly, ughh, relevant. Since that time I feel like Vh-1 has come through with the edgier programming that wasn’t so artificially funny. Let’s not get it twisted either because Vh-1 is definitely superficial, just not artificial and there is an important difference.
The fart jokes and college humor that made Beavis and Butthead a staple of television entertainment have been replaced by cheap staged stunts and shit that old people would find funny. If old people like your joke then 9 out of 10 times your joke sucks. Not to disparage old people and the people that think like old people, but we are not you. We used to be down with you but we stayed youthful and humorous. You got old and boring. This is why Adult Swim pwns empty-V all day every day.
Mtv was jammed up a few years back when confronted with the fact that they were over twenty five years old. While that doesn’t really matter to me since I am long since past that mark it matters to those that use superficial timeline constructs. Vh-1 has no such problem. Their demographic was always post-teenage anyhoo. It was Mtv that made the mistake of marketing itself to 16yr olds instead of realizing that market was fickle in the first place.
The last thing a 16yr old wants to do is some shit that OTHER 16yr olds are doing. Mtv could have let one of their sub-channels be the place where the JONAS brothers had the unplugged concerts instead of the main channel which needed to stay in the adult themed realm of music entertainment. I’m sure that Mtv execs had been shitting their pants ever since rap music became a pop music juggernaut. There weren’t enough videos from emasculated rap acts like the Black Eyed Peas to fill up their programming slots.
Now that rappers are wearing their younger sisters stretch jeans maybe they can get some spins on the video channel if only the video channel still played videos. I’d love to be a consultant to the Music TeleVision network. Lord knows they don’t have anyone over there that is willing to kick open the doors to the executive suites and beat the crap out of the current programmers. Everyone is simply content to keep their mouths shut and just collect their checks. Pretty soon the bottom will fall out of that game and then you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone.
