MTV blows its street cred
A network that once professed a social conscience pushes its usual trash as a genuine youth movement grows
Back in August, MTV celebrated its 30th anniversary of marketing youth culture to advertisers under the guise of covering great music.
There is no golden age of MTV, although a new oral history called “I Want My MTV” at least argues that there were better times to watch — namely, during its first 10 years. But if you were to identify the true height of the network’s influence, you might well point to the early 1990s. It wasn’t just the time of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — it was Rock the Vote, Choose or Lose, Boxers or Briefs. Presidential candidates needed to sit down with Tabitha Soren, and through town hall meetings, a youth agenda emerged during the 1992 campaign, just as Gen X graduated into the first Bush recession.
…MTV is eager to cover Occupy Wall Street; it just doesn’t know how, at least not in any substantial or meaningful way. MTV News’ “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” debuts today, following a protester named Bryan who works on the sanitation team and fights to keep the city from evicting the occupiers. And as part of its O Music Awards — which have noting to do with Oprah — MTV plans to bestow former Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello with a special award for Best #Occupy Wall Street Performance, for his strolling rendition of “This Fabled City.”
This is how MTV covers OWS – with a reality-esque documentary and an awards show. Which is fitting, since that’s about the only thing the network does anymore. It reveals a network that is clueless about the principles that inspired the movement and — perhaps even worse — exploitive in the most blatantly corporate sense of the word. Its first response to an important and possibly defining moment was to retrofit OWS to a format that’s easily as old as many of the demonstrators themselves. How long before we see JWoww and The Situation carrying picket signs? Could there be a “Teen Mom” at the protests?
Ughh, the “True Life: I’m Occupying Wall Street” is going to be sooo baddddd
