MTV, I Want to Want You...

...but you make it so damn hard.

MTV has been incessantly airing their latest movie award travesty all week, and I've caught a couple of segments while channel surfing. Another year, another boring awards ceremony. Even Sarah Silverman's jabs at Hollywood couldn't make up for the mediocrity.

I have a hard time letting go of MTV. I know it's crap - I think everyone does, including the producers - but I still have a lingering hope that things will change. Most of my younger friends from college don't remember when MTV actually was down to Earth, played good music and had some sort integrity left. They don't understand why I still insist on holding out some sort of hope.

The crappy movie awards got me thinking. Let's go back to the early 90's.

Remember when MTV was fun, when it seemed like the station was run by a group of adolescent boys? When their award shows were a good joke? When Nirvana started playing "Rape Me" instead of "Lithium" as planned and Chris Novoselic busted his head open with his flying bass technique? When Bill Shatner played all the characters from Se7en including the head in the box?

Remember when they played videos like this

and this

?

Remember 120 Minutes with Matt Pinfield? Yo MTV Raps with Ed Lover and Dr. Dre (what a great show)? Or Headbanger's Ball? How about offbeat shows like Aeon Flux and the Maxx?

Remember the good comedy shows on MTV, like the State and Remote Control?

This is not your daddy's complaint about the old days and "that damn noise" that's being sold today. There's a ton of great bands out there that have become popular just in the past few years. Good music exists, but of late, it exists outside of MTV's commercial sphere.

It's unfortunate. MTV has become a one big commercial. Every program is hocking something - phones, clothes, sunglasses, fantasy lifestyles - and making it seem like kids are just eating it up. I'm skeptical; I wonder what percentage of teens actually like MTV and how effective their marketing ploy dressed up as a music television channel is.

I also wonder when John Norris and Kurt Loder will stop playing hipster.

Here's to the past, MTV. My how you've changed.

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Though I grew up as part of the "MTV generation," I lived out in the sticks and we couldn't get cable until after I left for college. So alas, I've always known MTV as pure crap...

All I remember from the earliest days of MTV were music clips. When did they actually start making their own shows?

Got cable in 1981. I was sixteen years old and the first thing I ever saw on cable was MTV since it too debuted in 1981. I saw the first video they ever played when they first came on the air.

Now it's just a sad excuse for a music channel. Even VH1 is mostly documentary now.

Part of it has to do with the industry not doing videos for artists anymore. It's too bad. I remember early Madonna, my god she was a slut back then and I loved it.

Reminds me of the complaint by Agnes Angst, one of Lilly Tomlin's characters: "When I was born Elvis was already fat."

I remember MTV from my childhood mainly for the cartoons Daria and Beavis and Butthead. Dang that was good stuff.

I know I've been plugging it a lot lately, but you should definitely check out the PBS Frontline documentary entitled "The Merchants of Cool", and it focuses primarily on MTV and all the crap it spewed out (especially in the heyday of TRL).