June 12th, 2007
Think back to when you were starting middle school. The usual student's main concern at this age is simply fitting in. Trying to be "cool" and popular in the 6th grade and up is top priority. Sure, you can read teen magazines or rely on an older sibling to show you the ropes, but the fastest way to learn what's hot and what's not in society, at the age of 12 atleast, is simple -- watch MTV.
MTV was a big influence on me growing up. Even before middle school, I remember watching it back in the early 90s when I was just a young lad. While I didn't pay much attention to it, my general opinion on the network was that it was pretty good. As time progressed into my teenage years, it was basically all I bothered to watch outside of professional wrestling, Dragonball Z, and talk shows like Ricki Lake and Jenny Jones (remember those? LOL).
Even more time has passed and now I'm done with high school and have matured a great deal. The fact I find VH1, a channel that has dealt with a seemingly negative stereotype that it's for "unhip" grown ups for years, a hell of a lot more interesting than MTV these days scares me. Am I getting too old for MTV's brain washing schemes or have they really fallen off the mountain top?
Ah, the never ending question us 20 something's have to face. Did it always suck or did it just get crappier?
I say it's a little of both. I have indeed gotten older and with age comes wisdom. Truthfully, I think the entire network is crap these days. MTV, while I still watch it on a regular basis, is a nasty dried up and pathetic husk of what it used to be. This top 5 list is being written to explain the network's biggest flaws and provide a little entertainment via my hilarious rants lol.
5. Lame shows
Making The Band 4 is one of the rare entertaining reality shows on MTV now. A lot of people my age actually *watch* this..
MTV barely has any really good original programming anymore. And when I say "original programming," I mean actual shows with some thought put into them. While shows like Beavis and Butt-Head, The Brothers Grunt, Aeon Flux, The Head, Liquid Television, Singled Out, Daria, and more ruled the better half of the 90s, reality television proved it could be interesting with the first few seasons of The Real World.
Back then, The Real World wasn't just about throwing seven "hot" people together on TV and hoping they'd have sex or rip each other's heads off. Think back to the seasons like San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston -- those were much more genuine than the crap we get like Vegas, Sydney, and New Orleans. The Real World is even pumped out at a faster rate than before, effectively diluting any kind of "must see" element it used to have (in my opinion, the last good season was Hawaii) because it's over before it started and the cast members just blend in together worse than the average Myspace band's friend list.
Reality-based TV on the channel is at a nauseating high. While I do enjoy shows like Punk'd and Two-A-Days, do I really need to see My Super Sweet 16, Room Raiders, Next, The Hills, Parental Control, and others like them? The answer is no. In the late 90s to early 2000s, they had a fairly decent (dare I say "solid") line up of original programming. For instance, remember Undressed? What about The Tom Green Show? And for the love of God, 2Gether?
Today, the only decent shows are Made (not the new Super Made bull shit), True Life (which has been around for years any ways), and Scarred (only because it's so funny to see people fuck themselves up hardcore). Still, it's a far cry of what used to be available.
4. Focus on what's popular
 I know MTV is the pulse of the generation, but it always seems to skew towards certain genres and certain artists more than others. Whether it be Eminem getting an entire day of programming to himself (EmTV), pop music getting favored in the tail end of the last decade, or even now with the influx of hip hop skewed shows and specials, MTV is always attached to the "flavor of the month" instead of trying to break new artists or use their reach to build tolerance to other genres.
I remember back when I was in middle school (1997 - 2000, yes, I'm old) and my Black friends would condemn MTV for "playing White music" too much. That always bothered me because I listened to everything at that time and didn't like genres being placed into a restrictive racial box. Fast forward to now, and if you didn't look at the logo on your on screen guide, you'd probably think you're watching BET instead of MTV. Where the hell is the rock music?!
Sure, they slip in the occasional metal video every now and then just to say "they play it," but if you want to watch rock music you really need to watch Fuse or stay up extremely late to catch 1 hour of it on MTV2. Which brings me to my next complaint, wasn't MTV2 supposed to fix all this shit? The first few years of the expansion channel played the stuff the original MTV didn't have the supposed air time to do so. I was seeing new and lesser known artists on a regular basis; life was good, but over the span of a few years, it's become exactly like MTV in the aspect of latching on to flash in the pan fads and not really exposing the audience to anyone new. Just like when pop was dominating the airwaves in the later 90's with an overload of boy bands and marketable blonde sexpots or now with hip-hop basically being the new pop. It sucks and MTV loses an asston of credibility because of it.
The rest of the countdown is continued after the jump!
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