MTV turns 20 years old this year, saying goodbye to its awkward teens. Since grunge fizzled out, for the most part MTV shaped pop music into what it is currently. The experts are forecasting a huge, imminent shift in the popular taste of 12- to 19-year-olds who make up the network’s audience: “It?s gonna be a bucket of ice water in the face, and to those kids, Eminem and Britney are not gonna be enough. I think they?re gonna be biting the hand that?s been feeding them all this crap.”
what happened to the good ol days…. when there were good groups…. like when mtv started…. madonna…. michael jackson…. you know what i mean….
Well, it’s all subjective, isn’t it? I mean, I never liked Michael or Madonna. (For the record, I always thought Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” was the seminal early-MTV video…but not for the obvious reasons.) Even MTV’s early non-music shows (Remote Control, Half-Hour Comedy Hour, The Ben Stiller Show [the first one]) were eminently superior to most of the crap MTV spits out today. (Although I think, more importantly, those non-music programs only took about MAYBE 2 hours out of their programming schedule. Compare that to today…)
As for Pop Backlash – I think you’ve got two separate camps here. You’re going to have the kids who are going to follow the direction MTV follows, no matter how bland and whitewashed that ends up being, and you’re going to have the kids who finally realize that MTV is only feeding them what the record labels think is going to make money, and they’re going to turn to other types of rock, or other formats entirely. (In fact, that’s what drove me to listen to Jazz almost exclusively about 10 years ago.)