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If you'll allow the rant...
What is it with this station? Okay, sure I remember back in the day when it was a cheap knock-off of MTV; half as good with less than half the glimmer n' sheen that MTV was fast acquiring. As I recall, though, at least they were playing music videos. Then, they started targeting an "older audience" and the stuff they played gravitated more toward the adult-contemporary sound; you know, the folks that actually saw The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". It seemed like a good formula to me; a good business model. One station for the hep, young, up-and-coming crowd, and another for the twenty and thirty-somethings. Copacetic!
Then MTV became...whatever it is. I'm not even opening that can o' worms. I'm not even going to make the tired, hackneyed old gripe about neither network playing music videos any more. They actually both play videos in the morning, another smart marketing move as they know that folks that actually have to work are up early and may want a schmear of pop culture on their bagel along with some cream cheese.
No, the target of my rage (and when I say rage here, people, I'm talking some unhealthy shit. I'm talking half-tempted-to-pick-up-the-TV-and-throw-it-out-my-window-and-watch-gleefully-as-it-tumbles-three-floors-smashing-brick-walls-on-its-way-down-then-go-down-and-pee-on-it kind of rage. Or get all private-eye, track down some of the "VJs" and "comedians" that appear on these shows and adorn their front steps with flaming bags of dog shit or blow snot rockets in the seats of their cars kind of rage) are the shows that appear later in the evening and night on VH1. You know the ones I'm talking about. The ones that take a high-brow, look-how-stupid-we-were look at pop-culture relics and proceed, in the most angular and disjointed of fashions, to rake them over the coals by castigating them and stuffing pop-moments-past full of their New-Millennium, Horned-Rim critiques like so many Chicagoans stuffing their face with sausages at a Bears super bowl party.
First, from whence does this phenomenon hail? From what hellish, seething, ignominious, wretched, cesspool of a chasm does this brand of cut-up, culture-comment show come? How did VH1 arrive at this formula? My ire is raised, along with my suspicion, every time I accidentally flip to one of these shows that any segment of the VH1-watching public out there is actually writing in saying "Hey, great shows! Really loving it! Really loving the non-stars with their idiot, gas-bag ramblings and blowhard commentary on how bad videos and music of my youth are. What a dingbat I was for ever having liked this stuff in the first place! Please, keep that shit coming!" God forbid they might actually let the whole damn video play.
What's more is that some of the music that is the target of their ultra-hip "tsk tsk"-ing I actually kind of liked. Sure Starship was never as good as Jefferson Airplane, but I hum along with "Sara" every time I hear it and it always reminds me of Sarah in the fifth grade who told me she wouldn't go with me, and how crushed I was. Serious stuff here, folks! I haven't seen it yet, but if any of those shows ever target Peter Cetera, I'm making it my personal mission to find the producers and directors and let loose several skunks in their houses.
Of course nostalgia is a market. Advertisers have known this, and with the MTV/VH1 juggernaut, the effectiveness is two-fold because most of us not only grew up on the sounds but also the images - however cheesy, contrived, rote, and bland they may have been. There they are. I might even be a fan of taking a look at some of that stuff in a "Pfft, what the hell were they thinking? For that matter, what the hell was I thinking?" kind of light. It's these talentless hacks (most of whom are there only ostensibly bashing pop-culture, they're really salivating at the idea of what appearing on VH1 will mean for their career) who sit and comment on how horrible the song and video "We Built This City" is, and the directors who over-zealously use the music-video-cut-up technique between clips of the video and the commentary - well, again with the TV down three flights of stairs or the dog poop on the front step.
Besides being unfunny nincompoops, which is crime enough given that most of them are self-described "comedians" (lord, I can't imagine what it must be like to sit through one of their routines) I find the lot of them rude, dismissing, acrid, distasteful, apathetic, lazy, unimaginative, obtuse, blathering, and unforgivably inartistic. Shall I go on? Shall I? HMMMMMM?
Add to this most distasteful and untalented line-up of never-was comics the derogatory look at pop-culture-past via the tired countdown (only in these shows it's a "countdown to the worst") and the all-to-familiar video cut-up technique and you've got a formula for a nightly routine of suppressed rage that could set off Mount St. Helens and Mt. Ranier as well as moving the San Andreas fault several feet or for cursing and screaming at a tube and a piece of glass for a few minutes before snapping out of it and pushing the channel button hard - very, very, very, hard. C'mon, TBS, COME ON!!! CHANGE already!!
Thank you.
:rant:
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