Yo, MTV! I hold up a twisted little pink birthday-cake candle, dude, ’cause it’s yer birthday—happy birthday to ya!
Such was my birthday greeting to MTV, but the lumbering, soulless golem was too busy examining its exquisite corpse in the monitor and didn’t even see me and crushed me underneath its Naugahyde heel.
Who the hell can get it up for MTV’s 20th? It’s like getting invited to a birthday bash for General Motors. MTV is the OCP of pop music, the faceless corporation from Robocop that created a machine to solve all our problems. There’s only one problem—this machine usta be rock ’n’ roll.
Whad’ya do with my rock music, man? Give it the hell back! Children, I once believed in a religion of anarchy and noise, and it all got extruded into a jump-cut, op-art, faux-psychedelic Tampax applicator commercial. Awake from the narcoleptic haze of hip graphics and industrial surrealism. YOU’VE ALL BEEN CONNED! And all you middle-management corporate smoothies out there, you conned my generation, too, with this Classic Rock hucksterism. A little post-modernist sleight of hand, telling us that "everything is everything," and we should just relax. Like maybe we don’t realize that SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!
Hey, we’re all just one big Pepsi generation: Jimi Hendrix for SUVs and "Imagine" for dot-coms. What is MTV but a big assimilation combine harvester, a genre-splicing, clone-duplicating appliance? You think that MTV is cooked up by some cool dudes in the penthouse of that building in Times Square where they do TRL? Nah, it ain’t some cool, hip-hop clubhouse that just happens to be beaming all this stuff out at you. MTV is actually part of ViaCom, a huge conglomerate that not only owns VH1, VH1 Classic Rock, CMT (the country music channel), BET (the rap channel) and the Infinity radio station chain, but also Showtime and CBS!
It’s a monopoly, boys and girls. You have these mega-billion dollar government lawsuits over Microsoft’s hanky-panky, but let’s face it, Bill Gates foisting an internet browser on us seems a lot less insidious than a monopoly on music. All the music on TV comes from one source. One corporation dictating the worldview of millions of teenagers.
To celebrate MTV’s birthday this weekend, we were treated to the endless "Making the TRL Tour" infomercial. TRL being Total Request Live with Carson Daley (the Dick Clark of the ’90s)—MTV’s popular sub-teen afternoon show. This show alone has spawned the rampaging virus of boy bands and Britneys and so-called R&B groups. How dare you take the label R&B, the once funky kingdom of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave and Wilson Pickett and apply it to this pap?
Saturday night featured MTV’s happy-birthday-to-me celebration, saucily named "Live and Almost Legal"—maybe to prepare us for next year’s 21st birthday bash (the brain begins to freeze over). Carson Daly dizzily opens the proceedings by announcing that thanks to MTV we have, over the last twenty years, witnessed a musical revolution. What?!? Does he really believe this, or does someone write this bullshit for him? Devolution, maybe. The Duran-Duranization of rock is clearly what he meant to say. Billy Idol and Aerosmith, icons of the era? Are they mad?
MTV itself has moved out of the video racket and onto edgy teen-topic shows, so now there’s MTV2 for those who still want to watch videos. And whadda they got? A parade of cleverly filmed videos with high production values that have everything you’d want except the substance. But with all the smoke and mirrors, who but embittered old curmudgeons like me would notice such a thing? First up is Disturbed’s "Down with the Sickness," a portentous Black Sabbath retread with white supremacist overtones, followed by N.E.R.D.’s "Lapdance" (with Lee Harvey and Vida), a generic piece of black rap soft-core porn featuring babes and bikes, infantile consumerism and pathetic macho posturing. Next up is Adema’s "Giving In" with yer obligatory guitar wanking, more babes and meaningless B-movie sci-fi tableaux, all slickly coated with cosmetic angst. Then comes Limp Bizkit’s angry-white-boy rant, "Boiler," which I suppose can live, ditto Orb’s house phantasmagoria, "Toxygen," even if the 1984 scenario (evil-ancient-scientist’s-fiendish-lab-gets-trashed-by-righteous-young-dudes) is a standard video sub-genre. You’d have to be a real grouch to resist Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott’s "One Minute Man" (featuring Ludacris) or Scapegoat Wax’s harmless novelty number "Aisle 10 (Hello Allison)." Hey, maybe some of this stuff is okay. But nah! It’s all sold out. For the most part, it’s just gadgeteering and clever window dressing, with fast-cutting, still more babes and dry ice.
Checking out VH1, the old-timers MTV, there’s Bon Jovi’s "One Last Wild Night Concert"–only going to prove that we didn’t necessarily need MTV to homogenize rock into one bland brand of over-choreographed, over-coiffed, inane teen-teasing ArenaBlend™ rock complete with formulaic lyrics, Claptononymous power riffs and pointless pyrotechnics. It’s as if all this Defleppardacious sound and fury were produced by some amnesiac, kleptomaniacal replicant—and, in a sense, it is. It’s the company’s basic product.
Finally, the channel for gramps—VH1 Classic Rock. "It’s Jimi doing ‘Purple Haze,’ lads," I cry and jump outta my wheelchair and wave my cane around deliriously. It’s just a black & white film of a performance, but, hey, when you got Hendrix, who needs cherry pickers and exploding cars? At the beginning of the verse, Jimi looks as if he’s forgotten the lyrics (like he did on "All Along the Watchtower") or maybe forgotten how to sing. Toward the end, the set dissolves when Mitch Mitchell seems to be going into a drum solo—not that!—and then changes his mind, and Jimi and Noel Redding just stop playing. Brilliant! Ah, the good old days!
Okay, I know I’m beginning to sound like my grandfather—you know, the one who said everything was better in his day? In my day, we walked five miles to school! In my day, we really had snow! Of course, we all know that gramps was just a deluded curmudgeon, but, see, in my generation’s case… it’s all true! That’s right, folks! Things really were better when we were kids. You can look it up.
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