MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

Millennials and Gen Z may not know this, but MTV used to play music videos.

From the early 80s until somewhere around the mid-90s, MTV became a cultural touchpoint of sorts for almost every teenager in America whose household could afford basic cable (or knew someone who had cable at their house), particularly once it started producing dedicated genre shows like Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.

Robert Dean at Consequence of Sound wants to bring that back. His reasoning: in the age of Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and generic commercial radio, it’s ironically harder than ever to discover new music, in large part because there’s no shared community to hip you to new stuff and force you out of your comfort zone:

Like our politics, everything exists in an echo chamber; we’re not sharing a space to find things anymore. We link directly to a Spotify playlist and let it do the work. There’s no unexpected magic. It’s not rock and roll. It’s safe.

Dean argues that MTV served this purpose admirably in its heyday:


And that’s why we need to make MTV all about music again and become that central cultural community, he says.

I agree that some kind of community is essential to discovering new music. I strongly disagree with the proposition that MTV is the solution.

1. For a start, I think MTV’s role as community enabler is overstated. I mean, yes, programs like Headbangers Ball or Yo! MTV Raps had a fan base. But a shared cultural experience is not the same thing as a community. Communities are generally local and interactive. MTV was not that – it was a standard top-down model where tastemakers are telling you what cool bands you should be checking out (most of which are already signed to majors or imprints of majors). Personally, I’ve gotten more worthwhile music recommendations from actual people I’ve met and hang out with than from MTV block programming.

2. To be sure, MTV played a role as an aggregator to play music their audience might not have heard before, and then those people would go and report to you, or you’ll watch it together and share that moment of discovery. But radio can serve the same purpose – and in fact did just that at one point before everything became computer-generated playlists from corporate HQ distributed to the local affiliates.

Yes, radio is also a top-down tastemaker model, but it has the potential to be much more responsive to the community, and it’s more interactive in the sense that you could phone up the DJ, particularly for block programming shows where the DJ presumably loved this music as much as you did.

Nowadays, maybe MTV could do that by leveraging social media channels. But again, radio can do that too. NPR already does it, to astonishing effect via things like Tiny Desk Concerts, Viking’s Choice and All Songs Considered – and while NPR is a national network, it makes use of hundreds of local affiliates to explore more localized music options (or be the place to catch someone like Jeff Lynne while he's in town).

3. In fact, thanks to social media and the internet, I think the “community” hasn’t disappeared so much as fragmented into smaller tribes that defy geography and genre. I participate in several Facebook pages that serve as an example of what modern music communities look like – a bunch of people from similar but slightly different musical backgrounds sharing what they love. It might be fairly eclectic or highly specific (for example, I’ve seen various pages dedicated to fans of Syd-Barret-era Pink Floyd). But it’s still a community – and IMO it’s more of a community than any MTV block program ever was.

4. Which is why I don’t think MTV can serve as the music-discovery community Dean thinks it used to be – at least not by simply by returning to its music roots and focusing more on block programming, which is what Dean is suggesting. MTV came of age in an era when linear broadcast TV was the only option and hardly anyone else was doing what MTV was doing. We don’t live in that era anymore, and the Millennial/Gen Z crowd grew up with a completely different reality. You might as well ask a teenager to trade in their iTunes account for a Walkman.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess I wasn’t a big fan of most of MTV’s specialty shows in the first place, although 120 Minutes was alright, but I didn’t tune in regularly. To be honest, the only 90s era MTV show I watched regularly was Liquid Television, which wasn’t even a music show.

In terms of discovering new music (and I’m old enough to say this), I have to say that MTV was at its most interesting in the early 80s when it first started – partly from the novelty, but mostly from the fact that not many bands were making music videos, so MTV would literally play almost anything to fill up 24 hours, so you would end up seeing all kinds of nifty bands you’d never hear on the radio, especially late at night.

So for my money, MTV broke more new bands for me in its first couple of years than it ever did on a given block show that only aired for two hours per week.

Money for nothing and chix for free,

This is dF

[Via Matt Fraction]

There’s something marvelous about this. I gather in Old Days Of Televisions the networks would publish an industry programming report and hire an artist to do some cover art for one of the hot new shows that looked hip in a New Yorker/Village Voice kinda way rather than actually representing the show’s look.

Because there’s absolutely nothing here that gives you an idea of what The Monkees show would be like – apart maybe from “it’s about four guys in a rock group”, but that’s like promoting a show like Knight Rider with a cartoon of a guy driving a car. I mean, the guys in this picture could be the Beatles. Or the dozens of Beatles clones that emerged around that time.

Maybe that’s the whole point. It’s like if you took electromagnetic samples of Mickey, Davy, Mike and Peter’s souls and fed the data into a radioactive heat projector and seared the resulting image onto a wall, the very essence of the show is revealed: “Shameless Beatles Cash-In”.

Or something.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I love The Monkees – the show and the band. I don’t care what that does to my alt.cred.

Here we come,

This is dF

Well sure, how many times can he retire from The Daily Show?

You’ll be reading tons of dissections about him and his work at TDS and subsequent legacy over the next few days. Most will be favorable. Some will not be. Certainly no one at Fox News or CNBC is sorry to see him go.

You’ll also see a lot of digital ink about his final “bullshit is everywhere” speech. Other people may say what I’m about to say, but I’ll type it here since I got a blog to run here:

The real importance of that speech is that Stewart basically summed up the TDS mission statement and the reason for the format’s success.

That’s important to me because everyone makes hay about Stewart having more credibility than “real” journalists, which may be true. But a lot of people also make the mistake of equating what he did to actual journalism.

It never was. The objective of Stewart’s TDS – apart from topical comedy – was never to report news, but to ridicule the cable TV news format in order to demonstrate how badly “real” TV journalism was failing us at a time when we really needed it to serve as the Fourth Estate in the system of checks and balances it was intended to be.

Consider: most of the US govt's post-9/11 activities – Afghanistan, Iraq, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, waterboarding, throwing Muslims off airplanes for being scary to white people, etc and so on – went more or less unquestioned by the mainstream broadcast media for quite some time. It took a comedy show to point out the dangerous absurdity of neocon government policy combined with an increasingly irresponsible Wall Street and a complacent (or in the case of Fox News, collaborative) media.

And TDS was so good at it that Stewart ended up having more credibility than the cable TV outlets he was ranting at, at least for his audience. That wasn’t a comment on his journo cred so much as it was a comment on how bad “real” broadcast journalism had become.

Which I think is why a lot of people have come to misunderstand what TDS was all about. That perceived credibility annoyed and worried conservatives who branded TDS as an exclusively liberal propaganda machine (which of course is a fairly easy claim to debunk). Meanwhile, liberals embraced Stewart as Chief Truthteller – except for the hardcore ones who felt Stewart wasn’t using his position to take down the real villains of the Bush/Cheney years and ensuring the destruction of the GOP.

He didn’t do that for a reason: it was never Stewart’s job (or intention) to spend his time settling the Left’s political scores. The primary goal of TDS was to make fun of broadcast media and how politicians in power use the poor state of TV journalism to their advantage.

Put another way, the basic mission of Stewart’s tenure at TDS was bullshit detection, with its sights set primarily on the Powers That Be. During the Bush/Cheney years, that meant Republicans and Fox News were going to be the primary targets. That’s not an agenda – that’s how political comedy works: yr targets are whoever is in charge at the time.

In that sense, Stewart’s success really has been a classic case of right place, right time. His take on TDS probably wouldn't have become what it did if Al Gore was POTUS and 9/11 never happened. Or maybe it would have. But let’s admit that Bush, Cheney and Fox gave Stewart a wealth of material to work with.

Anyway, it’s interesting that many people’s opinions on Stewart and TDS are based more on what they wanted TDS to be than what it actually is. Stewart never claimed to be a journalist, but people on both sides wanted to peg him as one for their own reasons. The Right wanted to brand him a journalist so they could hold him to journalism standards of objectivity (and thus go around claiming he was biased in favor of liberals as though (1) this actually mattered and (2) it wasn’t hypocritical coming from people who watch Fox News). The Left branded him a journalist because he was doing what they felt the “real” media ought to be doing: namely, calling the Bush/Cheney admin (and other politicians, as long as they were Republicans) on their bullshit.

What’s interesting, though, is that while TDS wasn’t journalism, its success has arguably reshaped his audience’s expectations of “real” TV journalism. Old People like me have always assumed that politicians lie to us constantly, and that broadcast media was generally failing to call them out on this (print media was another matter, but most people still get their news mainly from TV). For a lot of younger people, TDS was a revelation of sorts to the point that they felt TDS was the only “news” show telling them some kind of truth.

Result: they now expect “real” TV news to do the same – and with the same level of anger Stewart and his audience felt.

Is that “real” journalism? Maybe it is now. We had similar discussions ages ago when Hunter Thompson, Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe were defying the traditional rules of journalism. And in an age where people think Addicting Info and Newsmax count as journalism, maybe objective journalism really is dead now, and all “real” reporters will be angry partisan hacks out to settle scores.

I’d hate to think that’s the case. But I am old and decrepit and set in my ways. Which means I don’t happen to think one side of the sociopolitical spectrum has a monopoly on “The Truth”, and no responsible media outlet (blogs included) should pretend otherwise.

Still, Stewart did helpfully give us one last piece of worthwhile advice: “The best defense against bullshit is vigilance. If you smell something, say something.”

That doesn’t just apply to Fox News, iTunes user agreements or Wall Street bankers. It could also apply to hyperpartisan blogs or those stupid Facebook memes everyone keeps circulating no matter how many times Snopes debunks them.

Stewart has had a great run with his TDS bullshit detection service, and his influence cannot be understated (though it can certainly be overstated). I can’t say it’s made a huge difference in terms of forcing TV news to up its game, or helping to repair the Batshit Reality Schism we currently live in, but at least he helped some people see the absurdity of it all.

Respect.

Meanwhile, I have no idea who Trevor Noah is, but I wish him the best of luck. It's good to know he won't be trying to copy Stewart's schtick. It will be interesting to see how many TDS fans hold that against him.

Yr moment of zen,

This is dF

And the part of the .44 Magnum will be played by …



[Via I Belong To The ___ Generation]

Works every time,

This is dF

And now here’s the original Six Million Dollar Man theme song.

By Dusty Springfield.

True!



This is from the TV movie that served as the pilot for the actual show.

Obviously, they decided to go with a different theme for the series.



I think they made the right decision. Dusty Springfield is great and all, but I can’t imagine that song opening the show every week.

Catch him if you can,

This is dF

It might look like this.



Okay, not really.

But that was more or less the premise – two androids have a flying saucer that, like the TARDIS, can travel in time as well as space. They pick up a couple of Earthling kids for a joy ride, lose control of the saucer and go whipping back and forth to different periods of Earth’s history as they try to get the kids back home.

Hey, it’s from the Krofft brothers.

I remember liking it at the time. Of course, I was also in 5th grade, so I was pretty undemanding as a viewer.

Gotta go back in time,

This is dF

Just as I haven’t watched True Detective, I also am not watching the rebooted Cosmos (mainly because it’s not available here yet, and I don’t want to see it badly enough to resort to piracy – they’ll stick it on in-flight entertainment systems soon enough).

Much has been made about the fact that Creationists are displeased over the evolution bits – specifically, that evolution is presented as fact and not theory (which for Creationists means, “If it’s theoretical, that’s the same thing as saying you don't really know if it’s true, yr just choosing to pretend it’s true to further yr liberal atheist agenda, unlike us”).

No real surprise there – I remember when the original Cosmos aired (and Carl Sagan published the book of the same name), conservative Christians complained about the exact same thing.

So yeah, nothing new there.

But I did come across this story in which Fox affiliate KOKH (Fox 25) in Oklahoma City interrupted part of Cosmos to show a news promo – and it just happened to broadcast right before Neil deGrasse Tyson mentioned evolution.

Oops!

Fox 25 claims it was a total accident. And the promoted comment at the bottom of that Ars Technica story suggests that it’s entirely possible that it was a legitimate goof.

On the other hand, as Ars Technica also points out, it’s a hell of a big coincidence to swallow when remembering that this happened in a state where Creationists have enough political sway that the state House of Representatives had just passed a bill that very week that would prevent school authorities from punishing a teacher who tries to “teach the controversy” – a bill that is based on a template from The Discovery Institute, the conservative Christian think tank that researches and promotes intelligent design.

So I’m not convinced it was all that “accidental” – although of course it’s perfectly conceivable that it was the act of a station employee and not a directive from upper management, if only because Fox 25 re-aired the episode the following Saturday.

Anyway, the only real reason I’m posting it is because it reminds me of how, when I used to have an apartment in mainland China just across the birder from Hong Kong, we could get TV signals from the two main broadcasters there: TVB and ATV. And whenever the news came on, and they started reporting a story on, say, Tibet, or the Dalai Lama, or Taiwan (which at the time was under the leadership of Chen Shui-bian, whose party advocates stronger independence from China), or anything negative about China, they would cut to local commercials until the story was over.

Because that’s what they do in China.

Not that there’s any comparison whatsoever between Oklahoma Creationists and mainland China. There isn’t.

I’m just saying, this reminded me of that.

Do the evolution,

This is dF

And so we decided to cover the Daniel Boone TV show theme song for no real reason. Which is pretty much the same reason we do any song, so why not?

Note the creative license.






DISCLAIMER: This song is not historically accurate. But neither was the TV show, so why not?

Like this song? Why not down it and other fine lo-fi tracks from the official Banäna Deäthmüffins page on Soundcloud?

Also, be the first to "like" us on Facebook.

With an eye like an eagle,

This is dF

They’re all dead.

Specifically, Russell Johnson, Dave Madden and Gary Grimshaw.

You’ve probably already seen a lot about Johnson, who of course is best known as the Professor from Gilligan’s Island. You may have also seen something about Madden, whose signature role was as Reuben Kincaid, the manager of the Partridge Family.

As for Grimshaw, you may not know him by name. But you probably recognize his iconic and influential poster work.



Arguably all three played an essential role in my pop-culture education – particularly Johnson, since I watched a lot more Gilligan’s Island than Partridge Family. (Also, I learned that if you were smart enough, you could make ANYTHING out of coconuts, palm fronds and seawater.)

That said, I liked Kincaid as a character. Also, you can’t ask for a greater name for a band manager.

I didn’t become aware of Grimshaw until later, but I love old poster art, and I like Grimshaw’s style, even if it is sometimes illegible.

Off the wall,

This is dF

ITEM: There is talk that Preacher – the legendary comic book from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon – has been greenlighted for a TV series, or at least a pilot. There is no proof of this. But it could be a thing.



Fan reaction has been largely mixed to negative, with complaints centered on two elements: (1) it will be on AMC and (2) Seth Rogen has something to do with it.

I can kind of see the argument against AMC – essentially, Preacher pushed the boundaries so hard in terms of sex, violence and Christian blasphemy that basic cable simply can't do it justice in the same way that (say) HBO could. On the other hand, HBO entertained the idea of doing a series several years ago, but decided not to because it was too controversial. So if it’s too evil for HBO, I’m not sure how AMC will deal with it. 

Still, I think Preacher was so insane and extreme that no TV or film version could get away with staying that true to the source material. Even if the filmmakers wanted to, the studios would probably lose their nerve. So any TV series based on it is inevitably going to water it down a little. Whether that's a bad thing will depend on who ends up in charge of development, to what extent Ennis is involved, who ends up writing it, and who they cast for the key roles. 

Personally, I think gory violence will be no problem if The Walking Dead is anything to go by, and the sex doesn’t have to be that graphic to stay true to the book. As for the religious aspect, considering that Supernatural already has lasted eight seasons on free-to-air television with a Heaven/Hell war in which angels are bad-ass and God is a sort of absentee landlord/deadbeat dad, I don’t imagine Preacher will have all that much trouble outside of the usual activist groups. AMC will probably get more heat for Arse-Face. 

Some fans may argue that it’s the extreme nature of the comic that defines it, so you can’t justify toning it down. That’s probably true. But it’s also true that TV, film and comics are not interchangeable storytelling formats. Moreover, TV/film versions of comic books are not made solely for comics fans. They’re made for a broader audience. So there’s going to be trade-offs.

And they don’t have to be bad trade-offs. The obvious comparison is The Walking Dead. Some fans of the comic hate the TV version, but the show has been successful on its own terms. It’s a good example of how to translate a story from one format to another and make it work within the limitations of that format. (DISCLAIMER: I’ve never read the TWD comics, so I could very well be talking out of my ass here.)

So in the end, I think Preacher has potential to be a great show, even if it turns the volume down a little. It could also suck big bollocks, even if it follows the comics panel by panel. But that would be true no matter what cable TV channel was developing it. So we’ll see.

As for Seth Rogen … well, who knows? I’m not really a fan, and I didn’t really care for his take on the Green Hornet. But if he’s not involved in the acting or writing, I don't have a problem with it.

And it’s all speculation at this point anyway. So I can’t get too worked up over something about something that may not even happen in the first place.

Gone to Texas,

This is dF