My Relationship With MTV: A Tale of Bad Taste

            Why is almost everything I like lame? How did good taste pass me by? Throughout my teens I was constantly on the hunt for what I should like. The emphasis being on should. I wanted to like things with substance, critically acclaimed things. I wanted to have good taste. I used to investigate. I used to try things, but still, somehow, the good things apparently passed me by. In a nostalgia heavy culture where anyone can go to the mall today and get a Led Zeppelin or Ramones T-shirt for some reason I’m wishing I could get my hands on a nice 311 t-shirt or Limp Bizkit poster. I’m just kidding, I may have bad taste, but no one wants a picture of Fred Durst in their home, but seriously I do still love those bands and I don’t really have any taste. Who’s to blame? I think that one entity more than any other is to blame. MTV.

            I was 11 when I first started to break away from my parents musically. That is when I first started putting on MTV. There are a few moments which stand out in my mind marking this time. One was the Ice Cube video “Bop Gun” which featured George Clinton. Ice Cube’s opening verse always intrigued me. He starts out, “1993, much more fi-e-i-ounce.” I remember this specifically because the video was shown in 1994 and Mr. Cube holds up four fingers in the video when he says three. It always perplexed me, but I’ll never forget when I started watching MTV because of it. Another moment that marked my foray into the world of MTV was the death of Kurt Cobain. The media coverage surrounding his death really made me take notice of Nirvana. Before his death I just thought that all grunge was Nirvana, bands like Sound Garden and Alice in Chains were all being branded in my mind with the title of Nirvana. I’ll never forget watching SNL and seeing Eddie Vedder lifting the left part of his shirt to reveal KC written over his heart on his under shirt. I remember it because I was thoroughly confused. Prior to this moment I never was really able to distinguish between Pearl Jam and Nirvana, I just knew they were both cool. In addition to that I always thought Kurt was spelled with a C. So I didn’t even really get that it was a memorial thing, Eddie just looked broken up while the rest of the cast of SNL waived and smiled, but in any case I figured this Nirvana is something I should look into.

Luckily for me, that was the perfect time for a clueless suburban kid to get into MTV. Everything was easily palatable. Grunge was turning pop with a lot of videos with bright colors and interesting visuals. “Heart Shaped Box” while gritty in sound was an explosion of neon colors and striking visuals. “Black Hole Sun” was practically a cartoon with its characters over exaggerated smiles and disturbing take on suburbia, I remember excitedly waiting for the moment in the video when the girl spit out her ice cream. Alice in Chains put out “I Stay Away” which used Claymation. I was hooked. The thing that got me to listen to Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” was now selling me on grunge. On the other side of music was Dr. Dre and his G-Funk, the 70’s funk hooks and feel were the perfect spoon full of sugar I needed to help the hard core lyrics go down. Who cared what they were talking about as long as I could sing along to the George Clinton chorus?

In addition to the music of the time there was now The Real World. I started watching The Real World in the second season during re-runs. Even back then MTV had a proud tradition of showing the same show seemingly on a loop. So despite the fact that my parents had control of the television when the show premiered I was still able to catch up to not only that season, but the one that proceeded it and by the time the third season came around it was something that my mother and I would happily watch together. I can’t truly explain what was so gripping about The Real World. I think it may have been the lack of a narrative. You could come in to the show at any point and immediately pick up what was going on. It was simply people arguing about issues set to a cool soundtrack. The first scene I can ever remember seeing was the David pulling the blanket off Tammy controversy. It was loud, it was dangerous, and it was everything that I needed to get me into the show. By the time Tammy had slammed her bedroom door into Beth’s head I was hooked and I’ve never looked back.

What’s interesting about my experience with MTV is how drastically it shaped how I saw music. MTV was basically how I saw music and if you wanted my attention you better be overt. I basically had to be told what to like or someone had to die. I got into grunge because Kurt Cobain died. I listened to Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. after they died. Biggie is the one that truly made an impact. Why? Because of two men, the first was Diddy, then know as Puff Daddy, and the second was Hype Williams. Together these two took the death of Notorious B.I.G. and built themselves an empire in my mind. I never watched Yo MTV raps, but I always watched MTV News and the Week in Rock. Partially because Yo was on at night when I was watching sitcoms and MTV News was on every hour, ten to the hour and the Week in Rock was on weekend mornings when my dad was playing racquetball. Therefore, I never really knew much about Biggie when he was alive. “Big Poppa” was on MTV Jams for a little while, but it was never as big a deal as Dr. Dre or the grunge of the time. Plus, while Dre and Pac were reenacting Mad Max with autotune Biggie was hanging out with his friends in a brownstone. Where was the production value? However, when the two of them died it was all over MTV news so I was forced to notice. After that Diddy took over. Every breath you take was a huge hit to me. It felt important, it was more than just another song it seemed to bring with it a narrative, plus it was directed by Hype so even though it was a memorial we still had neon colors and a motorcycle in which Diddy actually fell off. Diddy’s music seemed to matter more because it brought with it a story of a man losing a friend. Plus Diddy knew who to sell to people like me, it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you say something and it’s set to a song I already know. He then paired that with Hype Williams style and it was a match made in heaven for a dope like me. I got to listen to cool versions of songs I knew while people in shiny suits and bright colors danced around in front of explosions with a fish eye lens. What more could I ask for? So, the Week in Rock told me I should listen to Diddy, Diddy played songs I knew, and Hype took it from there. I feel like every video I saw in the mid to late 90’s was directed by Hype Williams and personally I wouldn’t want it any other way. Because of Hype I discovered Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliot, Q-tip, Nas, and Jay-Z, although it wasn’t until Jay Z retired that I truly took notice. Once again, it took a news story for me to take notice of something that a lot of people had been aware of for some time.

In 1997 MTV moved to Times Square and it really seemed like I was part of something. They went to the biggest, flashiest part of NY and had shows that felt improvised and new. In the beginning Toby was the face of the new-look network. He was British and he was pretentious and watching him made me feel smart, but when the show MTV live turned into Total Request Live everything changed. Boy bands emerged. Now there were two camps, boy bands and those who hated boy bands. I was firmly planted in the hating boy band camp and luckily my camp was full. Lesser known bands like Korn and Blink 182 now realized that if they wanted to compete they would have to dress up their image. Korn put out got the life and while they didn’t sound much different, now the lead singer, Jonathan Davis, was wearing a neon green velvet coat. Their entire video for “Got the Life” was a satire of everything that music video had become, but what did I care, there were once again bright colors and striking imagery. Blink 182 got everyone’s attention with humor, they just ran around their music video for “All the Small Things” naked. So that’s how it went for me, I was sixteen and my psyche was split into two sections, anger and humor, they both felt rebellious and novel and they both were led by MTV.  Limp Bizkit closely followed Korn which I was delighted by. Limp Bizkit was more palatable, more cartoony, more rap inspired, and their music videos were basically rip offs of the style that Hype Williams created. Fred Durst basically took everything he saw Puff Daddy do in 1997 and made it angrier and to me, at sixteen, that meant it was artistic. I thought being artistic meant you were creative and being creative meant you went against the mainstream and at that time through my MTV window, the Backstreet Boys were the mainstream and anyone who was against them was creative and for me, the angrier the better. No one ever told me about The Romantics.

When I turned 18 my horizons expanded. I went to college, I found out I was poor, and for the first time I strayed from my MTV, right into the arms of MTV2. 9/11 happened and my anger turned to depression. It was a smooth transition. My depression wasn’t clinical by any sense, it was the type of depression that can best be described as “I’m thinking and thinking makes me sad.” Thank god for Linkin Park and the birth of emo. The anger of the late 90’s gave way to the sadness of the early 2000’s and I was along for the ride. Woodstock 99 made everyone hate the angry frat boy so I joined the whiny introspective camp luckily for me Staind worked as a nice transition from Limp Bizkit to Linkin Park. Basically, I followed whoever was headlining the Family Values Tour. So despite the fact that they were popularized by the same tour I casted aside Limp Bizkit and followed the new and improved version Linkin Park. To me bands like Linkin Park and Incubus were intelli-rock. These guys were dealing with issues, not just yelling about them. From there MTV2 showed me bands like New Found Glory, Thursday, and Saves the Day. New Found Glory was just punk enough to make me think it was smart and the other two were so angst filled that I was sure it was good.

Everything came to a halt when I moved to New York in 2003. When confronted with actual taste and pretension I simply couldn’t hang. MTV was out of the music business and well on their way to the exploitation of teens, business. I no longer had guidance. I no longer had a rudder. Now, I just had people that were richer and smarter than me telling me that I had no taste. So, I turned inward, I became self actualized to an extent. I stopped the quest for what was good and began the quest for what I liked. I realized the things that were at the core of what I had liked all along, I was simple. I liked bright colors and catchy hooks. I became ok with my taste being unpopular. To some degree, I relished it. I would play New Found Glory and Good Charlotte extra loud in my apartment, just in case someone with good taste could hear. I became lame. Fortunately for me, MTV did leave me with two parting shots in 2003. Jay-Z retired and Kanye West arose. MTV covered both. Jay-Z was finally big news to the network and Kanye was an artist on the rise. To this day these two artists remain my favorite, they were the stop I got off on and for better or worse I have MTV to thank for that.

In truth I have MTV to blame for most of my personality. Without them maybe I could’ve been cool, maybe I would’ve discovered bands that make people respect me, maybe I’d have some taste. Did MTV create my bad taste or did my bad taste bring me to MTV, who knows? All I know is, I hope the next season of The Real World is awesome and I hope Hype Williams is doing well.