Why does MTV even have a VMA show anymore?

Yeah, I know, the show aired over a week ago. But people are still bitching about Miley Cyrus and her ass-grinding display. You wanna know why she did it? First & foremost, she has an album about to drop, and any publicity is good publicity. By shaking her ass in Robin Thicke's crotch, she guaranteed that middle America wouldn't shut up about their outrage (whether real , faux, or mock) and would ban their precious chirrens from buying her CD, which of course means that they will defy their parents and download it anyways.

The other reason: it made the MTV VMA awards show almost relevant for 2.3 nanoseconds.

Now, I've written about MTV before. In July of 2007 I lamented that MTV had jumped the shark into complete irrelevance.  In September 2007 I actually reviewed the train wreck that was the VMA awards that year. And in November 2009 I pondered the show "120 Minutes", a former MTV staple relegated to the pre-dawn hours of VH-1 Classic.

For you younger readers, if there really are any oute, MTV stands ostensibly for Music Television, and when it started it played 24-hours a day nothing but music videos. Now you just go to YouTube when you want to see a video, and MTV and its evil clones MTV2 and VH1 just play asanine bullshit all day that sucks your intelligence away. After much public outcry, MTV started playing some videos again early in the morning and calling it AMTV, but still, in an average broadcast day they are devoting less than 20% of their time to music on a good day.

Looking at the 24 hours comprising Thursday, September 5th 2013, according to the program guide on my DVR, starting at midnight there's 3 hours of Catfish: The TV Show, about people getting screwed over publicly in internet dating hoaxes. That's healthy and educational. From 3am to 4am you get Clubland, billed as a music news show, and then from 4am to 9am they play the aforementioned AMTV videos. Since I have a job to go to, I'll be missing that but I'm pretty sure in five hours they'll play the same 90 minutes over & over again, and each hour will contain perhaps five to six videos tops.From 9 to noon you get four episodes of True Life, where people bitch about their woes, from "I'm Desperate to Have a Baby" to "I Have a Hot Mom" . A couple more hours of Catfish follows.

They encourage you to hurt people online. Professional & classy, MTV.

From three to six it's some sort of idiot dating game show called Parental Control. Stimulating music entertainment, no?

At six you get some episodic series called Friend Zone, and from seven till eleven back to back episodes of Ray J, the guy who screwed Kim Kardashian on the video that made her famous. His show "Ridiculousness" sounds aptly named.

And to end the day you get from 11pm to midnite, a couple episodes of yet another lame-assed game show, Money From Strangers. So, out of 24 hours you get five hours of music, and just as much Catfish. The rest is just as lame. Music Television is 80% bullshit.

Yet, every year, they put on a self-serving spectacle, a mockery of an awards show to celebrate a medium they pioneered and made billions from but no longer give a rat's ass about. A good 75% of the videos they award stuff for are just whatever some popster's record label paid to promote and have never been seen by most of America unless it was through YouTube. MTV is as relevant to pop music these days as Rolling Stone Magazine is. Washed up crap.

When I was young and the video medium was new, there was groundbreaking animation and CGI imagery, and creative use of the medium by true artists. Now we get a skinny twunt trying to shake off her Disney child star image wearing a giant teddy bear and making stupid faces like a titless Jenny McCarthy. And really, kid, you didn't break any new ground in whorishness that wasn't already covered by Madonna, Britney, or Christina in years past.

168 hours in a week, and all I got was 2...

Special thanks to the guys at tcmediatech for their extensive archives

Back when I was just getting out of high school, long about the time when the Earth was cooling, Music Television (MTV) played these things called music videos. A curious thing, these videos, little movies used as a promotional tool to help sell records (I mean, CD’s). Some videos were iconic and full of really cool and groundbreaking effects, and some were just bloody awful. By the mid-90’s however, MTV began to stand for Miscellaneous Television as music and videos were supplanted and replaced by absolute crap. Faux reality bullshit, mockumentaries, contrived rehabs, and turning $400 hoopties into $30,000 super-hoopties; that’s what I was given instead of music.

MTV beget its doppelganger, MTV2, to play videos and try to maintain that edginess the original started with but failed to maintain once they became corporate whores. There was also Video Hits One (VH1), which in the 80’s played what I called “grown up vids”, or clips from adult contemporary light rock acts like Elton John, Billy Joel, and Richard Marx. Nowadays, VH1 plays a couple hours a morning of videos, and then they, too, go for the formulaic corporate crap of faux reality and other drivel.

Of course, the general rotation on MTV was Top 40 pabulum until the mid-90's when rap finally took over completely. MTV made little forays into other genres during the video era, mostly with rap and with the Saturday night heavy-metal Headbanger’s Ball, but for alternative music, the stuff I listened to, for a long time you were just shit outta luck.

In 1986, MTV acquiesced and deigned to spawn a show called 120 Minutes, which was created to play two hours of alternative-music videos each week, Of the 168 hours in a week, me and those like me were given only two of them, in a shitty time slot so late on Sunday night it may as well be Monday morning. Needless to say I seldom say it until after I graduated in 1987 and didn’t have to get up so early on Mondays.

On Sunday, March 10, 1986, 120 Minutes premiered at 1 a.m. on MTV, hosted by the ancient and venerable J.J. Jackson, one of MTV’s original VJ’s. The late Sunday night time slot would be its home for the next 17 years, with alternative music relegated to a mere two hours in the middle of a Sunday night.

Two of the show's early hosts: The late JJ Jackson (far left) and Alan Hunter (far right)Great red leather suit JJ. Seriously, dude, WTF?

In the early years of the show MTV tried out a number of hosts, including Alan Hunter, Kevin Seal, and Downtown Julie Brown. Alan Hunter was also an original MTV VJ. At least it wasn’t Adam Curry and his huge mane of 80’s Bon Jovi hair. Downtown Julie Brown? C’mon, guys…that pre-Spice Girls Cockney accent and “wubba wubba wubba” routine got old after the first 5 minutes. Kevin Seal got his start as some sort of wannabe comedian on that lame-assed MTV ”game show” Remote Control, a sort of poor man’s Bill Murray at best and poor man’s David Leisure at worst, introducing songs like he was emceeing a roast on Comedy Central. His foil on the show, although he camped it up a bit, was the show’s producer, Dave Kendall, who would come onto a TV monitor in glowing special effects and regale us with new releases and alternative music news. In 1989, Kendall became the show's first solid host.


Kevin Seal never quite seemed serious about his job as host or seemed to even care about the music. It was excruciating to watch him.

After Kendall left 120 Minutes in 1992, he was followed by many other hosts. In 1995, Matt Pinfield officially began hosting the show. Over the next four years, he became known as a walking music encyclopedia and remembered as the most recognizable host. By that time, I’d given up on MTV as a whole. Once the videos went away in favor of bullshittery like Real World, and other crap that continues to this day like B-list Celebrity rehabs for sex & drugs, and contrived celebreality faux dating shows where aging celebs dated skanks and then the skanks got their own shows that spawned more shows of the skanks' suitors.

MTV started to pre-empt the show in favor of crap like Road Rules and Lovelines in 2000, and it was downhill from there. It was moved from MTV to MTV2 in 2001 and moved to even later at night when zombies lurk about. The 120 Minutes series finale aired the night of Sunday, May 4th, 2003, at 1 a.m., hosted by Jim Shearer. He was joined by former hosts Dave Kendall and Matt Pinfield to send off the show. But, like zombies, the show wouldn’t die.

You can now find 120 Minutes Classic on (where else?) VH1 Classic. Sadly, they still give alternative music no respect whatsoever, keeping the show exiled to 4AM Sunday/Monday mornings. Thankfully I can just set my DVR to record it and I can watch it at my leisure later on. They include videos now from not just the 80’s heyday of alternative but the 90’s grunge and Second Wave. They also tend to include a new video from an established artist in addition to a classic cut, a sort of “Classic/Current” thing, for those artists who are still making viable music today.

There’s no host these days, and they play a steady stream of commercials over & over for the same products (Tempurpedic mattresses, ProActiv zit cream, the AbCircle fitness device, and that annoying commercial for FinallyFast.com), but the music is still the stuff I remember. Whoever is programming the rotation is keeping it relatively simple. There are certain artists, that I’ll call the A-List, that get played pretty much every week. The A-List would include Depeche Mode, U2, REM, The Smiths/Morrissey, New Order, and The Cure, and usually including Erasure and Pet Shop Boys, but they play less of a variety of clips from PSB & Erasure than the others. I mean, Erasure’s been around for 23+ years, and all VH1 can manage is “Chains of Love” and “A Little Respect”, and seldom do they play anything from PSB but “West End Girls”.

The show gets filled in by a rotating cast of B-List acts that you might see every other week, and there’s only a couple vids that get played by the acts despite many of them having huge back catalogs. These are acts like Psychedelic Furs, Echo & The Bunnymen, Siouxsie & The Banshees, A Flock of Seagulls, and OMD. And you can almost guarantee seeing “Cars” by Gary Numan, and the most whored-out song of the alternative era, “I Melt With You” by Modern English. Interestingly, they tend to only play the original 1982 version of the song and not the 1990 re-recording. Throw in the grunge rotation of Alice In Chains, Nirvana, and Stone Temple Pilots, top it off with a mélange of other alternative acts, and you’ve got the show in a nutshell.

No wonder people turned to YouTube. They could watch what they wanted, when they wanted, without the bullshit.

Here’s a sample of the last few shows I watched:
10/4/09
Erasure- Chains of Love, Modern English- I Melt With You, U2- I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For, U2- Get On Your Boots, Gary Numan- Cars, Devo- Beautiful World, OMD- If You Leave, The Cure- The Walk, Hole- Miss World, The Lemonheads – Into Your Arms, Presidents of the USA- Peaches, REM- It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, Blue- Boys & Girls, Bush- Machinehead, The Smiths- There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, Radiohead- Creep, Depeche Mode- I Feel You, Oasis- Wonderwall, Smashing Pumpkins- Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Nirvana- The Man Who Sold The World, Red Hot Chili Peppers – Suck My Kiss, Bad Religion –Infected

10/5/09
U2- Where The Streets Have No Name, Sinead O’Connor- Mandinka, REM- Losing My Religion, Pet Shop Boys- West End Girls, Talk Talk- Talk Talk, World Party- Ship of Fools, A Flock of Seagulls- I Ran, Lightning Seeds- Pure, U2- Desire, U2- Magnificent, Depeche Mode- Strangelove, Human League- Don’t You Want Me Baby, Tori Amos- Silent All These Years, New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle, REM – It’s The End Of The World As We Know It, REM- Supernatural Superserious, Alphaville – Big In Japan, Pet Shop Boys- Suburbia, The Replacements – I’ll Be You, Sinead O’Connor- Mandinka, Faith No More- Midlife Crisis
Note: Someone must have messed up in the programming room to play the same song twice in the show, and to play the same band three times.

10/12/09
They Might Be Giants – Don’t Let’s Start, Psychedelic Furs- Love My Way, Green Day- Basket Case, The Alarm- Spirit of ’76, Berlin- The Metro, REM- Radio Song, Alphaville- Big In Japan, Dramarama- Anything, Stone Temple Pilots- Wicked Garden, Craftwork – The Model, Social Distortion- Cold Feeling, The Replacements- Bastards of Young, Bob Mould- See a Little Light, Sublime- Date Rape, Bow Wow Wow- I Want Candy, Pearl Jam – Evenflow, Erasure- Chains of Love, Ministry- Just One Fix, Depeche Mode –But Not Tonight, Cracker- Teen Angst, Tori Amos- Cornflake Girl, XTC- Dear God


Matt Pinfield, longtime 120 Minutes host and fount of musical knowledge. This is his happy face...