Premier Rock Forum

Old Headbanger's Ball, Beavis & Butt Head and 120 Minutes will never be enough to render that station not crap.

There was certainly a period when they didn't know what they were doing or have high expectations, where cool things slipped in. But once major labels figured out the format, and especially later when it descended into reality TV hell, definitely Crap, wf Beavis and Butthead.

MTV2 was ok in the early 2000s, doing what MTV should have been doing all along focusing on 'up and coming' artists vs. showing the same Michael Jackson videos every 45 minutes.

I was a frequent viewer during the 90's. I liked the music videos, plus Beavis+Butt-head. I naively ignored 120 Minutes. Those weekends when they'd do 'Top 200 Videos of All Time' ruled, I'd fire up the VCR to record a lot of those and watch them over and over again.

Now of course, it's all reality shows and very little music. But I can't vote crap.

The 2021 MTV Video Music Awards are tonight. I guess they still do this show because they can.

I watched it all the time in the early 00s despite hating at least 80% of the content just for the chance of catching a stray cool hip hop video so I could tape it. They used to have differently themed "weekends", which were the high points.

Excerpt from my tracklist, no inherent order:
Wu-Tang Clan - Gravel Pit
D12 - Shit on You
Eminem - Role Model
Mobb Deep - Burn
Non Phixion - Rock Stars
Royce da 5'9'' - Boom
Onyx - Slam Harder
M.O.P. - Ante Up
2Pac - California Love
Dre & Snoop - Nuthin But a G Thang


And so on. Would still be crap if not for introducing me to Beavis and Butthead. AND to Daria!

Was not crap for many years, devolved into crap. Still crap.

I thought it was amazing in the middle 90's, but quickly took a hard lean into self parody.

Here in Canada we also had MuchMusic and MusiquePlus, which both got pretty good, late 90's going into the 00's.
They declined with the rest of cable before they could take a full-on MTV dump.

For better or worse, I feel part of that MTV generation.
It gets a reluctant, C from me.

I find it hard to articulate just how full and complete I feel knowing that I watched approximately no fucking minutes of this station when it was supposedly "good". No cable in the '80. Or the '90's. By the time I had cable MTV had deteriorated to it's current "who the fuck cares" status, a position I had always been in anyway.

It wasn’t actually that good in the 80s either. It mostly just frustrated you, because the occasional airing of “Paranoid” or Van Halen or something good was surrounded by Pat Benetar, Poison, and Bel Biv Devoe.

120 Minutes was a lot worse than you remember.

WF for Beavis and Butthead.

Edited to add: I just glanced at a bunch of 120 Minutes playlists. That show did play a fair amount of good stuff, but it’s amusing me how much MTV pushed Lloyd Cole, the Mighty Lemon Drops, Gene Loves Jezebel, Mojo Nixon, Big Audio Dynamite, and Guadalcanal Diary on the audience.

As a person starved for anything remotely countercultural in the 80s, and isolated from it both by technology and geography, any morsel offered up by MTV was nourishment. Heck, it was my first bona-fide exposure to "college rock", as it were. Once I lived in the dorms my freshman year of college, however, the veneer quickly faded. If it wasn't HR, it was the first season of The Real World.

Crap, but pouring out some waffles for what could've been.