The Aimster Blog

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ben-heller/why-the-hills-make_b_94324.html

I’d like to thank Ben Heller for saying these things better than I ever could. That said, I’m going to say something related.

I’ll cop right now to never having seen The Hills because I don’t think I’ve actually watched MTV for longer than twenty minutes since around 2006. My patience ran out sometime during the Carson Daly TRL era (and had been wearing thin long before that), at the exact moment that I heard him refer to something as “ghetto.” And I thought to myself: I have just heard Carson Daly, who may in fact be the whitest man in America (I’ll admit I haven’t researched this thoroughly), use the term “ghetto.” And use it unironically.  Ick.

So I was pretty much done with MTV around 2002, but then I mustered up enough loyalty to give the channel another chance, only to find that they’d given Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson their own show about how stupid she was and how increasingly bored he seemed to be getting with her stupidity, a show that turned them from married D-list nobodies into divorced superstars (well, her anyway). And then MTV added insult to injury by giving Jessica’s no-talent little sister a show about how to record your debut album when you have no talent (okay, that’s not exactly what the show was about, but you get my drift). And it was about at the point when Ashlee dyed her hair black to distinguish herself from Jessica and to show that she was all, you know, like, hard and stuff was when I thought to myself: Yeah, okay—I’m out.

But even though I’ve stopped watching MTV, I’ve heard of most of their shows because I read entertainment magazines (and read them snobbishly, I might add. I’m devoted to Entertainment Weekly, and will leaf through Rolling Stone and Blender, but I won’t stoop to read tabloids, Us Weekly, or any entertainment publication with the word In in the title). So, unfortunately, I know all about Heidi and Lauren and Tila Tequila and the rest of the low-brain cell count brigade.  And while I’ll be the first to admit that MTV probably wasn’t designed to emulate PBS, I’d like to forward the argument (and I’m guessing I’m not the first to do so) that if your network is no longer devoted to playing music, like, ever, that you should be forced to change your name from “Music Television” to something else that more closely mirrors what you’re all about. STDTV, maybe? The suits at Viacom can feel free to send me royalties anytime for that one.

When did MTV start going downhill? Should we have known it was all over as far back as the debut of Remote Control? Do we blame America’s insatiable appetite for Reality TV? While the answer to the first question may be “yes” (although I personally happened to like Remote Control), the answer to the second question is a little more complicated. Because for my money, MTV started Reality TV in the United States with The Real World which was, at one time, an interesting sociological experiment—or was at least edited to be such (I have no illusions about the show’s actual reality). Now, The Real World seems to be mostly an experiment in seeing how quickly two housemates can have sex in a hot tub after meeting each other. So did America’s insatiable appetite for Reality TV cause the shift in The Real World or vice versa? I vote for door #1. As Reality TV boarded the shocking-and-stupid train in the late 1990s and early 2000s—people eating sheep entrails for money, couples heading off to remote islands to see if someone else can destroy their relationship in a vacuum, everyone allowing themselves to be taped in the hopes of proving Andy Warhol right—The Real World had no choice but to get on board right along with the rest or risk becoming obsolete, and MTV has pumped out one increasingly-stupid-but-apparently-right-on-the-zeitgeist show after another.  

But I won’t be watching. I miss my MTV. The MTV that I sat glued to all day all summer at my friend’s house (Because she had cable. Because my parents were two of the last four people in the state of Missouri to get cable TV, the other two being my grandparents). I miss the MTV I didn’t dare turn away from because I might miss a second of a Duran Duran video. The MTV that had a Top 20 Video Countdown that actually played videos (as opposed to the five-second clips of videos shown on TRL). The MTV that had a contest to win John Cougar Mellencamp’s (because he was still using the “Cougar”) Pink House—I saw that commercial so many times I still remember it (“We’ll give you the deed and the keys and then we’ll paint the mother pink.”). The MTV that sparked my pre-teen crush on Alan Hunter (seriously—he was totally the VJ you could take home to Mom).

Hell, I miss the MTV that had VJs. What are they down to now—like, three, or something?

But the MTV that I am so nostalgically and naively longing for is gone. No longer does MTV give us the latest music news and the first videos from some band you’ve never heard of. Now it gives us twelve-thousand straight hours of America’s Next Top Model reruns. MTV used to break new bands. Now it gives us Making the Band 36, or whatever season they’re up to now.

Now it gives us Spencer and Heidi. Ick.

And now I, and millions of others, have a computer with a high speed Internet connection. So I’m off to see if America’s Next Great Band is lurking somewhere on MySpace or YouTube.