The Music TV Wars

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 01:31:03 GMT
Newsgroups: rec.sport.pro-wrestling,alt.tv.mtv
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Found this one at:
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0330/tv.php
TV
by Joy Press
The Music TV Wars
Reality Killed the Video Star
July 21st, 2003 1:30 PM
Maybe you've noticed a wall in your neighborhood plastered with
posters of Sally Struthers. Or maybe her chubby face has beckoned to
you from the side of a bus or phone booth. As usual, Sally's begging
for help, but it's not on behalf of Save the Children this time.
"Every day, thousands of videos go unplayed. Please help save music
videos," she pleads, playing her silly part in an ad campaign for
Fuse, a cable music channel.
The ads aren't just a calling card for a new network; they're also
part of an aggressive attack on MTV, which has long reigned
unchallenged in the world of music television. (Other music networks
such as VH1 and BET are all owned by MTV's corporate parent, Viacom.)
In full assault mode, Fuse put up a billboard directly across from
MTV's Times Square headquarters and distributed paper coffee cups
around the city that said, "Where's the M in Emptee-vee?"
People have been complaining about the lack of music on MTV since the
mid '90s, when it discovered that series like The Real World delivered
ratings much more effectively than amorphous blocks of videos ever
could. Sure, MTV now airs plenty of programs about music
artists—behind-the-scenes stuff like Cribs and Making the Video and
Diary. But music content is dwarfed by their popular slate of reality
series: Road Rules, Jackass, The Osbournes, Punk'd, and Sorority Life.
Only 22 years old, MTV also loves to mythologize itself, recycling its
greatest hits via histories of TRL or Headbangers Ball, and it
squeezes every last drop out of The Real World and Road Rules with
frequent rematches and reunions. The most hilarious bit of
self-deification came a few weeks ago in the form of Bash, a roast for
TRL cipher Carson Daly, a personality-free symbol of the sanitized,
all-pleasing MTV. Daly sat onstage while stars like Britney and Kid
Rock called him a star-fucker, ass-kisser, lech, and chameleon; they
showed embarrassing clips of Carson gibbering faux-ghetto slang with
hip-hop guests, then another of him sitting cross-legged with *NSync,
chatting about eggnog. "A clean slate with a blank head," Nelly
declared, adding "We all love him." After all, who wants to piss off
the powers-that-be at MTV?
Fuse does—their ad campaign is the equivalent of mooning their elders.
You have to admire their moxie, this upstart taking on a corporate
monopoly. The trouble is that Fuse ain't exactly an upstart. It was
formerly known as MuchMusic, a Canadian network that's been trying to
nose its way into the American market for a few years. This year,
MuchMusic USA severed its ties from Canada and performed the media
equivalent of an Extreme Makeover: It changed its name and overhauled
programming, styling itself as a renegade channel raging against MTV's
corporate edifice—a spurious stance, since Fuse is itself part of
Cablevision.
And Fuse's battle cry—that music television is dying out—isn't
strictly true. MTV already covered its ass with MTV2, which fulfills
the functions of the old MTV, playing videos for most of its 24 hours.
By the end of the year, MTV2 will be available in 50 million homes,
while Fuse was available in 31.2 million as of June. MTV2 has quietly
skulked around in the cable hinterlands for six years, but this week
it suddenly launched its first ever advertising campaign. MTV2 general
manager David Cohn denies that it was sparked by Fuse: "To make this
kind of financial investment in response to them would be crazy," he
insists. Either way, the music-video war has officially begun.
Looking back at tapes of early MTV, it seems hilariously raggedy:
clueless VJs hanging out in the studio as a weird slipstream of videos
glides by. Nothing bands from Nowheresville sprang up and became
icons, and for a moment it felt like no one was guarding the door. MTV
ushered in a bum-rush that knocked radio programmers off their
feet—briefly. What made the channel so appealing back then—and what
neither Fuse nor MTV2 really has—was its mutant eclectism. As recently
as the early '90s you could tune in and watch Dr. Dre followed by Guns
N' Roses followed by Siouxsie & the Banshees followed by C&C Music
Factory—music culture in a blender. Today such a jumble of genres is
regarded as a potential "trainwreck," the word DJs use for a bad mix.
In videoland, if you switch styles, "you give people a reason to tune
out every three minutes," says MTV2's Cohn.
So both Fuse and MTV2 divide their music programming into bite-sized
blocks. MTV2 built its reputation on college rock but is trying hard
to branch out by devoting a chunk of the weekend to hip-hop with
"Sucker Free Sundays." Meanwhile, Fuse targets a younger demographic
with its puree of nu-metal and post-Green Day pop-punk, interspersed
with occasional blocks of alt-rock, commercial rap (under the banner
"Authentic Hip Hop"), and even a Latino music show.
Above all, Fuse's main gimmick to differentiate itself from MTV2 is
interactivity. Their new name signals a desire "to fuse different
media platforms," according to network president Marc Juris. That
means finding a way to integrate instant messaging, gaming, and Web
browsing into a TV context. Juris says Fuse chooses its playlist by
letting the audience vote for videos on Oven Fresh, and it lets
viewers speak to each other via Dedicate Live, an update on the
old-fashioned radio dedication that clutters the music video screen
with text boxes of random IM babble. Sometimes the notes are quaintly
personal ("I'm sorry Jeff said no, he's really ugly and looks like
he's 10"), but just as often it's pure cliché of the "this band rocks
hard" school. It makes CNN's news crawl look downright minimalist.
Fuse's other interactive program, IMX, runs a stock ticker beneath the
videos. The concept is similar to MTV.com's Fantasy Music Tycoon game,
with viewers allotted a certain amount of play money to wheel and
deal. Juris explains, "IMX allows you to be a pretend record executive
and to put your money on artists you think are gonna be big. Like last
year, Ashanti came out of nowhere. You could hear her and decide if
you want to spend a lot of money on a sure thing like Celine Dion or
take a risk on Ashanti and get a 600 percent return. You get the fun
of scoring points and bragging rights that I was in on her before
anyone else." (It's funny that kids who routinely rip MP3s off the
Internet would want to play at being music moguls, especially when
that industry is nearing ruination for that very reason.) IMX takes
the current obsession with weekly movie and record grosses to a new
level of cynicism: Now even pre-teens understand music as a commodity
rather than as the stuff that dreams are made of, the elusive thing
that helps you make sense of your life and haunts your head.
Fuse and MTV2 may be fighting over who plays the most music, but the
sad truth is that this is a poor time to be heralding a return to
nonstop video. The imagination level of the form is at an all-time
low, give or take a Radiohead or White Stripes. Most nu-metal videos
focus on live performances by tattoed, goateed guys as their tattooed,
goateed audience headbangs in unison. Hip-hop videos tend to be more
colorful (and expensive), but the exuberant surrealism of Hype
Williams is gone. All that remains is bling and butts, currently
reaching its enjoyable reductio ad absurdum with Nelly and P. Diddy's
"Shake Ya Tailfeather" and Chingy's "Right Thurr."
These days there's so much rump shaking, I worry that some of that ass
might detach itself and whirl right off the screen. In the age of
wall-to-wall goatee and booty, perhaps MTV's retreat from the music
video was a sensible decision after all.
Tehawk ©2003
The Cerebral Assassin
ICQ #4610826
http://www.tehawk.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~tehawk
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