LOS ANGELES — MTV, which used to stand for Music
Television but now stands for whatever combination of youth-oriented
programming the network is airing at the time, turned 30 on Monday.
There are grown people who will not remember a world without it, who
will not recall Madonna and Bowie and Boy George exhorting them to
demand “I want my MTV,” a line that Dire Straits’ Mark Knopfler later
put into a song about hating rock stars.
Thirty, according to an aphorism from a
youth-oriented decade even older than MTV, was the age beyond which
someone was not to be trusted. But the network decided never to grow up;
it remakes itself to reflect the changing times, running like Alice to
stay in the same place, which means that it is continually liable to
alienate one audience as it courts the next. As early generations of
viewers rumble into middle age, it has become possible to use the
phrase, “This is not your father’s MTV” without irony, and indeed, your
MTV already may not be your children’s.
When MTV was all music, all the time — even when it
was mostly music, most of the time — change was built into the system:
as music went, so went the network. If it was a little tone-deaf to
start, with its Up With People “veejays” and rejection of black and
harder-edged music, this improved with specialty shows like “120
Minutes,” “Headbangers’ Ball” and “Yo! MTV Raps,” and more so as the
specialties became the mainstream. The network could look revolutionary
or like a corporate co-opting of revolution, depending on where you
stood, musically, and what videos they were playing that day. But at its
best it offered a catholic mix of styles and stances, from the purest
factory pop to the almost avant-garde — the spandex and the flannel, the
puffy pants and the big gold chains, the mullets, fades, shaved heads
and hippie hair, high fashion and anti-fashion.
It is largely out of the music business now — videos
have been herded into the hours many channels reserve for infomercials —
and the music business isn’t what it was when MTV was born. The
decentralization of production and distribution of pop, to which the
Internet responds impeccably, would have made the network less necessary
in any case. But it retains, if only as background, its music-based
cachet, and remains a complicated of mix of art and commerce,
exploitation and public service, a tension that will remain as long as
it stays in the business — even partially — of selling adult imagery to
kids. (The network estimates its viewership runs from 12 to 34.) There
are unresolvable arguments to be had about early-period Britney jail
bait videos or “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” the big-penis comedy that
spearheaded the network’s current move toward scripted fare, arguments
that may do no more than make you show your age.
But the network also does well by its younger
viewers. Just as animated “Daria” provided a heroine for the young and
disaffected back around the turn of this century, teenage documentary
series like “Made,” “True Life” and “I Used to Be Fat” — even “16 and
Pregnant” and “Teen Mom,” for all their Jerry Springer potential —
respect their subjects. (Viacom’s nastier reality shows mostly roost at
VH1, MTV’s older-skewing sister station.) Measured and unhurried,
they’re a model of what reality programming should be, prompting you to
think twice about people you might easily dismiss, the rich and
privileged as much as the poor and floundering.
Even the easily maligned “Jersey Shore,” which began
as a sort of parody of the network’s “The Real World,” featuring people
who would never be cast on “The Real World” in a place “The Real World”
would never send them, has something of this quality. To be sure, there
is something questionable about using a young woman who appears to be a
complete alcoholic as a figure of fun. Yet the show doesn’t quite demean
her, either, or her housemates; they do grapple continually with the
meaning and consequence of their actions. (They don’t necessarily learn,
but they grapple.) And they love life.
To a great extent, the network that created the
branded network has de-branded itself; there was a time when you could
be sure in an instant that you were watching MTV. Now it is harder to
tell. At the height of its cultural domination, it provided an
integrated experience — from the videos, to the often brilliant
promotional spots, to the dance parties and news bulletins. It was not
just a network, but a place — a place you could actually go to, if you
got yourself onto “Club MTV” or down to Times Square when “Total Request
Live” was in session or down to Florida for spring break.
That community, and the real joyousness that attended
it, is no longer a service the network provides, and that’s a shame.
Snooki may be pulling in the numbers, but will you remember her fondly
when you’re old?
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