AV Club: "Why Taking the Music out of MTV Still Hurts&q

[Chromodynamic]

I usually like what the Onion's AV club has to offer, but this article.. I don't know what to make of it, I'm pretty sure I hate it.

[CJMcG]

I usually like what the Onion's AV club has to offer, but this article.. I don't know what to make of it, I'm pretty sure I hate it.

Considering what MTV originally did for music as a whole, I think you're a moron for hating that article.
MTV helped to establish a medium in which people who normally wouldn't go out and buy an album a way to see a reason to buy an album.
It helped the music industry a shit ton and believe it or not it helped out indie labels.
120 Minutes started in the mid 80's and helped small labels like SST get their artists out there to a world that didn't even know who the Minutemen or Black Flag were.
If you'll also notice this article was in this weeks issue as well.

[Chromodynamic]

I usually like what the Onion's AV club has to offer, but this article.. I don't know what to make of it, I'm pretty sure I hate it.

Considering what MTV originally did for music as a whole, I think you're a moron for hating that article.
MTV helped to establish a medium in which people who normally wouldn't go out and buy an album a way to see a reason to buy an album.
It helped the music industry a shit ton and believe it or not it helped out indie labels.
120 Minutes started in the mid 80's and helped small labels like SST get their artists out there to a world that didn't even know who the Minutemen or Black Flag were.
If you'll also notice this article was in this weeks issue as well.

MTV's impact on music isn't what bugs me about it, I wouldn't try to argue about what it did or did not do for musicians/indie labels in it's heyday because I was born in '82 and didn't give a shit about music until MTV began it's decline. A lot of it seems to be hyperbole: the erosion of music for the casual listener by the internet and especially the notion that an artist needs to sell records in order to live. I like the premise of the essay, but just think it's poorly written - which is why I wasn't sure that I hated it or not.

[tommydski]

I couldn't care less about MTV.

I hope they go down the shitter with the rest of the mainstream music industry.

[Sid Hartha]

120 minutes was cool for a short time - I discovered a lot of good bands on it. Then it was shitty for a long time before they pulled the plug.

I certainly don't miss music videos, or watching MTV. In the long term, I think it did more harm than good.

[barndog]

120 minutes was cool for a short time - I discovered a lot of good bands on it. Then it was shitty for a long time before they pulled the plug.

I certainly don't miss music videos, or watching MTV. In the long term, I think it did more harm than good.

MTV was basically a global top 40 station. It got old very quickly - the same videos seemed to be in constant rotation. 120 minutes, as someone noted earlier, was great as well - but then when alternative / punk became more mainstream it went donwhill fast.

[Lazybones]

Riki Rachtman.

[rayj]

120 minutes was cool for a short time - I discovered a lot of good bands on it. Then it was shitty for a long time before they pulled the plug.

I certainly don't miss music videos, or watching MTV. In the long term, I think it did more harm than good.

120 Minutes made me very angry before I could discover anything cool about it. I would often stay up late on a school night to catch a video they would announce by a band I truly liked, then they would play the usual roster of garbage (Aztec Camera/bands that sounded like Aztec Camera) for two whole hours. I remember trying to stay up in order to catch whatever Killing Joke video they were going to play ("please don't run 'The 80's' again, VJ baldie"), only to fall asleep. I awoke halfway through the eagerly anticipated video, which was indeed an interesting song I had never heard before...and which was being used as a bed to roll credits over. They clipped the end, too. Bastards.

[a. james]

I couldn't care less about MTV.

I hope they go down the shitter with the rest of the mainstream music industry.

absolute agreement.

[chairman_hall]

(This is especially true for "serious" bands that appeal to "serious" fans who prefer "no image, just the music, man," the most contrived image of all.)

How can not caring about an image, and caring more about the music, that is an image you have not planned or orchestrated be the most contrived image of all?

Wow, this green grass is the most non-green grass i have ever seen.

[steve]

Whenever I start thinking an article about music was written by an idiot, sure enough, the article removes all doubt:

Image has always been more important than the music, at least when it comes to convincing people to buy records. (This is especially true for "serious" bands that appeal to "serious" fans who prefer "no image, just the music, man," the most contrived image of all.)

As pointed out earlier in the article, pointing-out that MTV no longer plays music videos is itself a cliche. Every time I point out how ridiculous the cliche boilerplate quoted above is, I pray that pointing it out will become obvious enough that it too will become a cliche.

Anybody who says in seriousness, "Image has always been more important than the music" is ignorant of music, image, and probably the meaning of the words "always" and "important." I detest this kind of knee-jerk "white is black, actually..." crap. It runs through "music journalism" like a rash and it is retard bait.

A bigger problem than lazy writing is the general dismissal of serious intent as an affectation. I suppose someone bemoaning the loss of the MTV aesthetic might be capable of such a position, but as someone who works with and around musicians making records every day, I am denuded of my ignorance, and so cannot harbor such simplistic twaddle.

Everything about this article smacks of the same self-satisfied ignorance that has equally emboldened the date-raping 'sup bro's and the Bush administration: Seriousness is a sham, nothing is real, "elite" is bad, meaning what you say is gay, what's your problem dude?

Fuck this shit right in the eye.

[Minotaur029]

Steve, you have a way of getting the blood a-boilin'.

My face feels hot.

Someone find a Republican for me to punch!...or if one cannot be procured, find me a liberatarian!

[chairman_hall]

I am going to try and use the phrase "denuded of my ignorance" in an everyday conversation over the next few days.

[steve]

Forgot to mention the conclusion of the article, which is fittingly the dumbest part, and which displays the most ignorance of the subject:

And keep your hippie and punk ethos out of it—artists need to sell records in order to live, even the really cool ones who never got played on MTV, but benefited indirectly from those who did. (See every crappy punk band that starting selling records because Kurt Cobain mentioned them in an interview with Kurt Loder.)

Bands don't particularly need to sell records. Most of the bands the writer can conceive of never got paid for the records they did sell. Record companies need to sell records. Bands just need to continue being bands, doing all the things that earn them a crust, with record sales being only a part of the picture. It's a bigger part for those that don't rely on big record companies, and (also fittingly) these are the bands that harbor the "hippie and punk ethos," and will likely survive this lack-of-videos-on-MTV "catastrophe" quite handily.

One can only conclude that our ignorant writer doesn't believe they exist, or are just pretending. Because image has always mattered more than music.

Fuck off.

[a. james]

i can't believe steve read the whole thing.

i didn't even click the link.

[sparky]

(See every crappy punk band that starting selling records because Kurt Cobain mentioned them in an interview with Kurt Loder.)

I found the above stupid and rude. At best, if he was referring to the likes of Flipper, the Wipers, the Jesus Lizard and the Meat Puppets, then his dismissal is one of appalling taste.

However, I suspect that he is unaware of whom he is dismissing. Which amounts to mere ignorance and sloppiness.

Either way, I am unconvinced that the endorsement has resulted in any of the members of these bands being significantly further rewarded.

[Wood Goblin]

The AV Club usually publishes some good film reviews, often with very high standards and, yes, an appreciation of serious attempts at serious art.

But the rest of that section has vanished into a pop culture toilet, wherein crappy video games, bad television, and celebrity gossip get treated with either dated irony or appalling reverence. What astonishes me more than anything is just how much goddamn television those writers and readers watch. Reading the comments to the blog posts breaks my heart in a small way: don't you people ever get outside, even for a single second?

People think fondly of the early days of MTV because they forget why we watched it: because we were young and bored and because nothing else was on television. They also forget just how much MTV exploited the promise of hipness and excitement: stay tuned for the Killing Joke video that our young programmers want to play; it will come right after 90 minutes of soul-killing shlock mailed to us by the label execs down the street. Some of us realized that the television had an 'off' button and found other activities to interest us; the rest started writing about pop culture.

[emmanuelle cunt]

Funny thing. First thing I thought when I read about this image being more important than music thing was that it is pure bullshit cause I was listening to second or third cassette copies of Sonic Youth or Shellac all the time in high school without even knowing how do the original covers, not to mention band members, look like. And then I read a post by the said band member.

As for MTV, I have never cared. However... anyone remembers Viva Zwei? Whoever is responsible for canceling it should be boiled alive.

[Ace]

Everything about this article smacks of the same self-satisfied ignorance that has equally emboldened the date-raping 'sup bro's and the Bush administration: Seriousness is a sham, nothing is real, "elite" is bad, meaning what you say is gay, what's your problem dude?

Steve, you have a way of getting the blood a-boilin'.

My face feels hot.

Someone find a Republican for me to punch!...or if one cannot be procured, find me a liberatarian!

I find this kind of funny - the sort of value relativism that the Bush administration is responsible for, the one that pervades through every pore of society these days, is exactly the kind of things the Republicans/ Libertarians hated in the 80s, the politics that the neocons' original principles were built on.

Don't get me wrong, I despise the Republicans in both Reagan and Bush Jr. forms, but I hate value relativism even worse. The fact that the Republicans have done a 180, from being the most fearful of what re-evaluation would mean to taking their reins and forcing their concepts of what is right and wrong down the throats of the American people is so weird. American politics are sickeningly fickle.

Anyways, there's my little pretentious rant. It's hard not to be obsessed with value relativism if you're in Chicago...