"MTV created a space where we felt like we all went to the same school, and I like to call that school MTV high. We might have been different classes and been in different cliques..."

"... the hair bands, the punkers — but we all were aware of each other and have an understanding of each other. Every time see a teenager walking down the street in an MTV t-shirt, I feel so proud because I know they're picking up on the passion and the energy that got MTV off the ground."

Said Martha Quinn, commemorating the beginning of MTV, 45 years ago today.

Everyone always likes to say the first video was "Video Killed the Radio Star," but what was the next video and the next? I found out:

"How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s... The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind."

This is a great article in the NYT by Ben Sisario, and this is a gift link so you can get to all the many fine elements of the article, which I will hint at with this excerpt:

“Everybody wanted to sound more modern,” said Trevor Horn, who produced key ’80s albums by Yes, Grace Jones and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “And drum machines and synths sounded more modern.”... Yes hired Horn... to produce... the band its first, and only, No. 1 hit.... 

That single was “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” with a sharp-edged guitar riff and a dreamy irresistible hook. Horn was intrigued by the short synthesizer interjections on the demo version by Trevor Rabin, the group’s newest member; Horn used the Synclavier keyboard — then the cutting edge of studio tech — to turn them into jarring multi-layered sonic goblins that seem to leap from the shadows.

The 3 phrases in boldface can be clicked on, at the article link, and you'll hear exactly what they refer to. Unlike the link on the song title — which goes to the music video on YouTube — I wasn't able to copy the code and make it work here. So please click on the gift link if you want to know what counts as "sonic goblins" in the mind of Ben Sisario.

"Paramount Erases Archives of MTV Website, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30 Plus Years."

 Headline at Roger Friedman's Showbiz 411.

All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written. It’s as if MTV never existed. (It’s the same for VH1.com, all gone.)... 

MTV News became a force in music, entertainment, and politics in the early 90s. As the channel’s popularity soared, the News division — including the faces of Kurt Loder, Alison Stewart, Serena Altschul, Sway, and John Norris — became incredibly important especially to political campaigns. Now all those interviews — hundreds of thousands of hours with rock stars and what we now call influencers of generations — have been replaced by a link to “Help! I’m in a Secret Relationship.”...

There is fury among MTV.com writers past and present who now see their histories erased, along with all the music and political reporting....

"Who has clear plastic and fish tubing laying around the house?"

Once there was journalism — some people think — but then came the decline... who knows when it began?

So long #MTV News, it was a great ride 📺🎸 https://t.co/t4ygMnP4LQ

— Martha Quinn Ⓥ (@MarthaQuinn) May 10, 2023

"We’re a comedy show and there are obviously a lot of words we’ve been careful to weed out. We’ve used words like ‘unhinged’ or ‘intense’ to replace ‘crazy.’ Are there words you would suggest using?"

Said Jennifer Flanz, executive producer and showrunner of “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” quoted in "In closed-door meetings at MTV, creators are grappling with how to make entertainment more responsible/An inside look at an ambitious plan that has writers working with mental-health professionals" (WaPo).

Would calling someone “crazy” or “unhinged” contribute to the kind of stigmas that makes people afraid to seek help?...

“It’s definitely OK to find humor in the challenging experiences people face,” [said Meredith Goldberg-Morse, senior manager of social impact at MTV Entertainment Group]. “But when you’re doing that, it’s important to be mindful of not sending the message that the person managing the condition is the punchline of the joke.”

Notice that there are 2 different phenomena under discussion here: 1. Actual mental health conditions, and 2. The use of mental-health language to insult or mock. These 2 things are interrelated, because caring about people with actual mental health conditions seems to be the main reason to think you ought to refrain from using mental-health language to insult or mock. 

I can think of some other reasons: 1. It's stale and unimaginative to just call the people you don't agree with "crazy." 2. It's inaccurate (you're not diagnosing a disorder). 3. It's a way to avoid making specific and substantive arguments. 4. It's hypocritical (because you yourself sound crazy when you endlessly call other people crazy). 5. It's part of the problem of winding people up about everything (which is why I stopped watching "The Daily Show" years ago).

"The original cast of 'The Real World: New York' recently wrapped filming in their original loft at 565 Broadway..."

"... a source close to production confirmed to Page Six on Thursday after much speculation" (NY Post). 

Great. I love "The Real World" — at least as it was in the first 3 or 4 seasons. I dropped out after that. The new season will have the cast from the first season, now almost 30 years older. I think when I dropped out of the viewership it was because the people were too young. I started out maybe 10 years older, but that thing went on for 33 seasons. When the people are 20 — or 30 or 40 (!) — years younger than you, their problems and antics get really tiresome. You're talking about a whole season of episodes and getting to know many characters. I seem to remember that after the really excellent 3rd season, things went into decline. I don't think it's merely that I got older and more age-separated from the cast. The show's manipulators seemed bent on getting pretty people to do sexual things to each other. They were always getting into a hot tub and drinking. That's even boring to do, but it's horrible to watch.

"Why didn’t Chewbacca get a medal?"

On the occasion of the death of Peter Mayhew (the original actor to play Chewbacca), Kyle Swenson asks what is an old question . It's not a question I've ever considered (unless I forgot my musings about a movie I saw more than 40 years ago). But the answer has got to be speciesism (that is, metaphorically, racism) — right? Otherwise, why remember and perseverate about this plot point? It's got to interweave with our present-day obsessions or why write a WaPo column about it?

As a crowd looks on, Princess Leia bestows gold medals on both Skywalker and Solo. But Chewbacca — who displayed just as much courage as his two human cohorts — goes unrewarded. The scene has since had fans asking whether Chewbacca was unjustly cheated out of the victory spoils. Or, as the “Star Wars Explained” YouTube channel asked in 2016: “Is the Rebel Alliance just as racist as the Empire?”

Mayhew himself had 2 answers:

“One, they didn’t have enough money to buy me a medal. Or two, Carrie [Fisher] couldn’t reach my neck, and it was probably too expensive to build a little step so that I could step down or she could step up and give me the medal.”

Back in 1977, George Lucas said something that I think is a cover-your-ass, after-the-fact explanation:

“Chewbacca wasn’t given a medal because medals don’t really mean much to Wookiees. They don’t really put too much credence in them. They have different kinds of ceremonies,” Lucas said. “The Wookiee Chewbacca was in fact given a great prize and honor during a ceremony with his own people. The whole contingent from the Rebel Alliance went to Chewbacca’s people and participated in a very large celebration. It was an honor for the entire Wookiee race.”

Swenson digs up something that I actually did remember ‚ Chewbacca got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the MTV Movie Awards (in 1997):

The eclipse of the actress. When the awards categories are merged, the category will be "actor."

It's already happening at MTV.

The special word for the female actor began disappearing a while back, as if "-ess" is demeaning. We don't say "poetess" anymore.

But does that mean different categories are bad? The roles — other than very minor roles — are almost always written in gendered terms. If a requirement of equal numbers of male and female nominees and an award for both a female and a male were to end, what would happen? Given the kinds of roles that male actors play, I think it's quite likely that they would dominate — not as much as males would dominate in sports if gender separation ended — because they tend to get bigger roles, with a wider range of things they get to show off their powers doing.

Here's the full list of actors who've been nominated for Oscars for leading roles (with the winners identified), and here's the corresponding list for actresses. Try to imagine different years with the categories merged. In 2012, poor Jennifer Lawrence as Tiffany Maxwell in "Silver Linings Playbook," would have had to duke it out with Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln.

And think of the fights we'd have to have. We've seen the #OscarsSoWhite criticisms of the unequal treatment of black performers. Obviously, we don't have separate racial categories for the awards, so the disparities show, though they are complicated by the unequal numbers of people of different races in the United States (and the UK). The merging of the gender categories would put disparities in a stark light, given the equal numbers of males and females in the population. There's an expectation of numerical equality, but I don't think that's what we'd see. It might be good to see that disparity and have more conversation about it.

But I think the separate gender categories for the awards are better for women, mostly because movies tell stories and the stories involve gender roles in endlessly complicated ways. We'd be distracted and confused trying to talk about what kind of equality we want, and I think the stories would suffer. Movies are bad enough already. It might be even worse than merging men and women in sports contests. At least in sports it might be possible to measure the competitors in some scientific way and assign them to different classes — weight, muscle mass, etc. etc. You can never do something like that in art.

"Jon Dovey writes about how reality-TV programming affects the way we understand the very concepts of truth and authenticity."

"With the rise and dominance of reality television over the last twenty-five years comes the concomitant belief that humanity is knowable via the investigative camera, the first-person essay, and the webcam confessional. Dovey writes, 'Statements about the world no longer have any purchase unless they are embodied, relative and particular rather than totalizing, general and unified.' Indeed, MTV traffics in the self—it rolls out a seemingly endless list of personal stories, unique identities, which are, nonetheless, ultimately generic and universalized."

From Amanda Ann Klein's "Thirty Seasons of 'The Real World'" in The New Yorker, which doesn't identify Dovey or link to his writing. I'll guess that he's this professor of screen media. I couldn't Google to more context for that quote.

I was interested in those ideas because they meshed with something I just read, the old Tom Wolfe essay,  "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" (linked yesterday in this post). That was written in 1976, which was 16 years before "The Real World" even got started (in 1992, the year of the first Clinton presidential campaign). That Wolfe essay is about the vitality of American individualism and ends quite profoundly:

In Democracy in America, Tocqueville (the inevitable and ubiquitous Tocqueville) saw the American sense of equality itself as disrupting the stream, which he called “time’s pattern”: “Not only does democracy make each man forget his ancestors, it hides his descendants from him, and divides him from his contemporaries; it continually turns him back into himself, and threatens, at last, to enclose him entirely in the solitude of his own heart.” A grim prospect to the good Alexis de T.—but what did he know about . . . Let’s talk about Me!

Tocqueville’s idea of modern man lost “in the solitude of his own heart” has been brought forward into our time in such terminology as alienation (Marx), anomie (Durkheim), the mass man (Ortega y Gasset), and the lonely crowd (Riesman). The picture is always of a creature uprooted by industrialism, packed together in cities with people he doesn’t know, helpless against massive economic and political shifts—in short, a creature like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, a helpless, bewildered, and dispirited slave to the machinery. This victim of modern times has always been a most appealing figure to intellectuals, artists, and architects. The poor devil so obviously needs us to be his Engineers of the Soul, to use a term popular in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. We will pygmalionize this sad lump of clay into a homo novus, a New Man, with a new philosophy, a new aesthetics, not to mention new Bauhaus housing and furniture.

But once the dreary little bastards started getting money in the 1940s, they did an astonishing thing—they took their money and ran. They did something only aristocrats (and intellectuals and artists) were supposed to do—they discovered and started doting on Me! They’ve created the greatest age of individualism in American history! All rules are broken! The prophets are out of business! Where the Third Great Awakening will lead—who can presume to say? One only knows that the great religious waves have a momentum all their own. Neither arguments nor policies nor acts of the legislature have been any match for them in the past. And this one has the mightiest, holiest roll of all, the beat that goes... Me... Me... Me... Me....

ADDED: Isn't it funny for The New Yorker to be brooding about the effects of reality TV on the American mind and not to mention the most dominant reality TV character of our time: Donald Trump?

"A Manhattan man who sued because his real-life identity was outed on MTV's 'True Life: I'm a Chubby Chaser'..."

"... is fat out of luck, a Manhattan judge has ruled."

Tristan Watson and roommate Nadine Crosbie filed suit against the reality show's producers last year, claiming they were duped into thinking their home address would not be shown and that Watson would only be identified by the name "Tee" on the show, which focused on people who intentionally seek out extra-plump partners.

Of course, MTV makes anyone participating in this sort of show sign a written contract agreeing not to sue about anything, and the lawsuit was always doomed... which make you wonder why — if he were truly so troubled about getting outed — he'd sue, making his identity even more well known. I'd have never heard of this character if I hadn't seen this news report about the lawsuit. One must conclude that he wanted the publicity. He participated in the show, and then he drew even more attention to himself.

Watson claimed that he received a death threat "slipped under the front of his door of his apartment," but as the top comment says: "Why would he receive a death threat because he's a chubby chaser? That makes absolutely no sense." That question gets a funny reply: "maybe it was 'Fit Mom' threatening him, LOL."

(Do you know about "Fit Mom," the lady who got temporarily banned from Facebook for complaining about media boosting the self-esteem of fat people people of fatness?)

(That last link goes to Jezebel, where I am struggling very hard to resist the temptation to click on the "top story" in the sidebar: "The Epic, Disgusting Removal of a Blackhead 25 Years in the Making." Talk about the need for will power!)

"Radio Digs Its Own Grave as Cultural Currents Shift."

"Stolid biz loses a generation; Wi-Fi in cars could deliver a crushing blow."

Most people under age 20 have never experienced good radio. So when baby boomers and Gen X’ers start waxing rhapsodically about their old-time favorites, wanting them to come back, it’s the equivalent of wishing that musicvideos would come back to MTV.

Insiders believe that there’s no revolution in terrestrial radio because the owners know it’s headed into the dumper. They’re just milking it for all they can before it falls off a cliff....

MTV executives thought that "Buckwild could fill a void left by one-time juggernaut Jersey Shore."

I have heard that those without religion have a "God-sized hole" in their lives. But imagine having a Jersey-Shore-sized hole.

"Buckwild" was a reality show with fun-loving young people in West Virginia, but then its best character, Shain Gandee, died. The cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning, apparently a consequence of one of the supposedly fun activities, "mudding" — driving off road. You don't want the tailpipe of your vehicle stuck in the mud. Poor Gandee was only 21. And now the show is cancelled.

After several days spent weighing the implications of moving forward with the reality show, MTV brass ultimately decided it would be imprudent to do so...

According to one series insider, internal conversations were had on the day of Gandee's death about potentially "softening" the show, which has focused on such behavior as off-roading, tire roll-downs and hard partying. But doing so likely would prove incongruous with the show's brand -- and potentially turn off viewers in the process. 

The brand. It can't include struggling with the death of a young person. The Jersey-Shore-sized hole in the MTV viewer's life doesn't yearn to be filled like that.

What if we actually let Gandee's death open a new door of meaning? What if we fixed our eyes on the reality of the consequences of endless wild fun and let the sadness of Gandee's fate transform us and bring new dimension to the lives of young people who are hurting and longing for some depth, something to hold onto in this world that seems so heartless sometimes?

Nah.

The brand. The brand.

"I have no problem with people in this country trying to earn a profit..."

"... but I would ask them: Would they do this to their own children, in their own neighborhood, in their own home state?"

Leave West Virginia alone!

"Barry, baby, you see what I got here... Why, this is a box of pudding, Barry."

"It says 'cook and chill' and, baby, that's what I do every night. I cook and then I chill."

$240 Worth of Pudding - watch more funny videos

That's Thomas Lennon and Michael Ian Black playing Barry and Levon on the early 90s MTV show "The State." The music was originally Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing," but the DVD of the series did not get the rights to the music. Unfortunately, that means the voices had to be overdubbed too. So this should actually be much funnier. But anyway, I was just thinking about this clip this morning. You don't have to worry your pretty little head about why.

Now why is it that I can't just enjoy my pudding?

"Real World: Occupy Wall Street? MTV Issues Casting Call for Protesters."

Great idea. A protest itself is a lot like a reality show anyway. There's a lot posing and performing for cameras. With MTV involved, there will be better editing and more poking into the details of the motivations of individuals and the interpersonal friction. As they say on in the "Real World" introduction: find out what happens... when people stop being polite... and start getting real. Scoff if you like, but I bet it's more real than what we get in the news.

And, MTV? If you want some protest vibe for your show, how about "Real World Madison"?

Lady Gaga's Andrew Dice Clay routine — "Joe Calderone."

She's one of the guys.

All the big pop stars want to be actors, don't they? But only 2 have succeeded, by my count. Most fail, following Elvis... not that following Elvis is such a bad thing.

The lameness of Obama's stance on Don't Ask Don't Tell.

Here he is at the MTV "townhall" yesterday:

A Conversation with President Obama on MTV

First, I can't believe he said "you look like a student" to a woman who identified herself as a member of a university faculty. That is an irrelevant and, I would say, sexist remark. Not only is it equivalent to saying "gee, you're pretty," but it's revealing that you have a picture of what professors are supposed to look like and you don't mind derailing the conversation to say she doesn't look like one. I know it's supposed to be a compliment, but it's really clueless. Believe me, I've had people say "you don't look like a law professor" or some such thing to me thousands of times over the last quarter century, and I remain superficially polite, but I can tell you it is not appropriate in a professional setting. Unless we are in a social context where it would be welcome for you to say "you look beautiful," then you should not say "you look like a student." Okay?

Now, to the substance: The woman, Bridget Todd, asks the President:

I know that you’ve mentioned that you want the Senate to repeal it before you do it yourself.

My question is — you as the President can sort of have an executive order that ends it once and for all as Harry Truman did for integration of the military in in '48. So I wonder, why don’t you do that if this is a policy that you are committed to ending?

Obama responds with a lot of words:

First of all, I haven’t “mentioned” that I’m against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. 

Oh, lord, he begins by getting all pedantic about words. I'll get pedantic back. She didn't say he mentioned that he was against DADT. She said he mentioned that he wanted the Senate to repeal it instead of doing something that he might be able to do on his own.

I have said very clearly, including in a State of the Union Address, that I am against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and that we’re going to end this policy. 

Fine, so he's repeating the promise that some people feel very bad that he has not kept.

That’s point number one. Point number two, the difference between my position right now and Harry Truman’s, is that Congress explicitly passed a law that took away the power of the executive branch to end this policy unilaterally. So this is not a situation in which, with the stroke of a pen, I can simply end the policy.

Now having said that, what I have been able to do is for the first time get the Chairman of the Joint Chief’s of Staff, Mike Mullen, to say he thinks the policy should end. The Secretary of Defense has said he recognizes that the policy needs to change. And we, I believe, have enough votes in the Senate to remove to go ahead and remove this constraint on me as the House has already done so that I can go ahead and end it.

But, as the linked blog post (by Jane Hamsher) indicates, he doesn't have the votes in the Senate and he hasn't put the weight of the presidency behind getting Senators to vote for repeal. He seems like he's using the statute as an excuse, so that he can play both sides on this issue. I understand the political motivation for that, but it amounts to breaking his promise to end DADT.

Now we recently had a Supreme Court — a district court case — that said DADT is unconstitutional. I agree with the basic principle that anybody who wants to serve in our armed forces, and make sacrifices on our behalf, on behalf of our national security, anybody should be able to serve. And they shouldn’t have to lie about who they are in order to serve.

So don't appeal the case! Say you think the court got it right! Or say that you think DADT isn't unconstitutional. It's just bad policy, and you object to the judiciary taking over in this area.

And so we are moving in the direction of ending this policy. It has to be done in a way that is orderly because we are involved in a war right now. 

That's pretty much a cloaked statement that he thinks the court was wrong and that the policy is constitutional. It's not "orderly" for the court to strike it down. The judiciary shouldn't be supervising the military. I'm going to assert with confidence that that is his opinion.

But this is not a question of whether the policy will end. This policy will end, and it will end on my watch.

The arc of history is long! Keep waiting, oh captive voters. Who else are you going to vote for?

But I do have an obligation to make sure that I’m following some of the rules.

Some of the rules?! Man, if you are only following some of the rules, why not give gay people a break?

I can’t simply ignore laws that are out there. I have to work to make sure they are changed.

Pssst. The Constitution is law.

The return of "Beavis and Butt-head" ... with new episodes!

Reports the NY Post:

The return of "Beavis and Butt-head" will be a backdoor means for MTV to return to showing music videos -- something the network was founded upon but abandoned in the last decade to make room for popular reality shows....

Great! I love "Beavis and Butt-head." Back in 1993, when the show premiered, people really were watching a lot of music videos, and it was great to have a show that helped us view them critically. The big joke on us was that it took 2 idiots — Beavis and Butt-head — to make us more perfectly hypercritical of the stupid junk we'd been watching.

The basic plotline revolved around two shorts-wearing, spectacularly immature teenage pals whose banter was delivered against the backbeat of their constant idiotic laughter.

Key word: shorts-wearing.

ADDED: Heh. I got distracted by the shorts theme and forgot to make the point I was aiming at. When the show first came out, we'd been really into watching music videos. But, as noted in the article, MTV abandoned its video mission long ago. The new plan is to use the show to bring back to music videos. So The original design of B&B was to make us laugh at something we were caught up in — and, essentially, to laugh at the funniest thing: ourselves. Since we're not currently into music videos, indeed the point of bringing back B&B is to get music videos back onto MTV, we won't have that element of seeing the absurdity in something we take at all seriously. But presumably Mike Judge — the genius behind "Beavis and Butt-head" — will find new ways to make it good.

AND: "This sucks. Change it... It better start rocking or I'll really give them something to cry about."

"The internet's completely over... The internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated."

"Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you."

Sayeth Prince.

"The Democratic disaster scenario would make absolute sense if it did not also require that the Republicans do something right."

"The whole world is expecting a cataclysm for the Democrats in November," Gail Collins concedes. But she notes what is obvious: You can't beat something with nothing. You can't run Not A Democrat. You have to dig up an actual Republican that real people will vote for. It's not so easy.

***

Also in today's NYT is this Jeff Zeleny/Adam Nagourney piece about how Democrats who've long held seats in the House of Representatives are finding their safe districts not so safe anymore.

Representative David R. Obey has won 21 straight races, easily prevailing through wars and economic crises that have spanned presidencies from Nixon’s to Obama’s. Yet the discontent with Washington surging through politics is now threatening not only his seat but also Democratic control of Congress.

Hey, Zeleny's in Ashland. Welcome to Wisconsin!

In the Seventh District of Wisconsin, which covers 17,787 square miles from the middle of the state to Lake Superior, signs of Mr. Obey’s service in Congress are found in new bridges, highway expansions and countless other projects. Yet there are fewer signs of Mr. Obey himself. At the Democratic Party office in Wausau, his hometown, campaign placards hang in the window for Senator Russ Feingold, but none for Mr. Obey.

When asked to discuss his re-election bid, Mr. Obey declined, saying that it was too early to begin talking politics and that he was focused on his legislative duties. “I have never met anyone who thought political campaigns were too short,” he said.

Can Obey take solace in the Gail Collin's theory about the dearth of Republican opponents?

Mr. Obey, 71, was elected two years before [Sean] Duffy, 38, was born. Mr. Duffy is widely seen as leading in the Republican primary — his opponent is the candidate who lost to Mr. Obey two years ago by 22 percentage points — and his race has drawn support from party leaders in Washington, Tea Party activists and Sarah Palin.

He has been elected four times as the district attorney of Ashland County, but the attention surrounding him began in 1997 when he was on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston.” 

"The Real World"! Were you still watching "The Real World" in 1997? I bailed after Season 5 (Miami). That show peaked in San Francisco (Season 3). Here's a list of all the seasons. Boston was Season 6.

He also is well-known here as a champion lumberjack sports competitor.

He said he decided to challenge Mr. Obey because of his leading role in the economic stimulus bill, health care legislation and the growth of government. “I know that I can have a serious impact on the direction of the country if I could take out Obey,” he said.

Take out?

But Mr. Obey, who has a campaign balance of $1.4 million compared with $400,000 for Mr. Duffy, is also emblematic of a bright spot for Democrats: a financial advantage.

That's something. But $400,000 is not nothing.

ADDED: Duffy is married to Rachel from "Real World" San Francisco. Now, that means something to me. Rachel, whose full name now is Rachel Campos-Duffy, was an out-and-proud Republican on the show. And Rachel and Sean now have 6 children: Evita Pilar, Xavier Jack, Lucia-Belen, John-Paul, Paloma Pilar, and MariaVictoria Margarita.