Sometimes, you just gotta hate Viacom.
It’s not the smart thing to do, especially for people like us that would really like some exclusive news once in awhile. They own lots of cable TV that you watch (and your mother does her morning aerobic step-master workout while watching) and – if you like it or not – we gave them this power by being okay with the mid-90s moniker, the MTV Generation.
In our lifetimes, MTV has popped up out of nothing, cut its own place in the world and sat in that place until they completely ditched the M and stuck mostly with the TV.
Viacom’s teenaged cash-baby has grown stale to those of us that have been through one too many reinventions. We keep crying out: “Show more videos, you’re MTV!” and they keep responding with the very rational argument that they have study after study proving that no one watches videos on MTV no matter what time they air them, and MTV needs to make money as a brand. Videos are no longer financially viablefor Viacom’s flagship property.
That’s fine for a business and a TV channel and MTV’s cool-makers would probably argue that if they aren’t pissing off the channel’s original audience they aren’t doing their job.
Thing is, MTV’s cultural influence is the music and the style. That’s why strangers and snobs will explain mainstream media’s transition into “quick-cutting” as some sort of MTV-inspired visual freak out.
MTV is how David Fincher started raising eyebrows as a video director.
Spike Jonze too.
MTV airing Michael Jackson videos changed the skin-color of pop music.
Somewhere along the line, MTV and Viacom decided that they could market directly to the tweens, a sought after demographic since all they do is go to school and spend their parents money when they aren’t watching TV. Business wise, this made a lot of sense. What they sacrificed was their style and the music. As a result, MTV had its teeth taken out.
Call us pop culture conspiracy theorists, but during the Wardrobe Malfunction scandal, very little was made of MTV’s involvement. “Wardrobe malfunction” though it may have been, someone at some point suggested that some clothing get ripped off Janet Jackson. It was planned, it was choreographed, and MTV cut and run. CBS was part of Viacom at the time and managed to catch most of the flack in the controversy, while only banning MTV from planning other half-time shows.
MTV was “mortified” and went on a international press tour touting their new delay broadcast system.
MTV sulked and held Viacom together as CBS faced FCC fines. For a nipple! As misguided a “stunt” as it was, it was still a stunt, thought of by someone and inadvertently setting off the ridiculous controversy about people seeing a nipple (note: we all have nipples, look on your chest, there should be 2) on television.
We were hoping MTV would point out that absurdity, but it ended up being South Park that did so.
That’s a shame.
MTV should have been covering Radiohead’s internet release method. TLC’s Battleground Earth, where Ludacris and Tommy Lee compete to make their tours green and increase environmental awareness? That should have been broadcast on MTV.
And WHY would they shoot a Rocky Horror Picture Show re-make based on the original script that “might include music not in the original?”
Sometimes you gotta hate Viacom, because they took something that was good and changed it in an effort to sell it back to us. And they’ll do it over and over and over again.
