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After watching the Cubs fail to come from behind against St Louis one fine Saturday afternoon in May, I flipped the channel in absent-minded disgust to M2. Now called “MTV2,” M2, it will be recalled, was actually pretty great -- no “veejays,” no reality-TV shows, no hit comedy promotional tie-ins, no frills. Just music videos. OK, now, yes, absolutely, you’re right: music videos are a bankrupt form, parasites on the body of music, the art form closest to the mind of God. But be all that as it may, you will have to admit that music videos, regardless of their intrinsic validity or lack thereof, made for cooler television than MTV’s House of Style, or, you’ll forgive my bringing it up, Total Request Live. It took an incredibly precipitous drop in quality to make a person yearn for MTV’s good old days, when air-headed bomber-jacket hair casualties spoke glowingly of “All music videos, all the time,” but MTV has managed, over the last few years, to stage just such a drop. Only a person with an agenda would deny that MTV isn’t just worse than it used to be: its present state makes its former self seem high-minded and culturally weighty by comparison. |
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