Rey Flemings

*** Note: After writing this blog, I discovered that MTV has chosen to only allow you to view its videos on their site. Apparently, the extra 1 / 100th of a penny they earn for each view is more important than the blogsphere being able to promote their content for free. How could a network so on the cutting edge get everything so wrong? I left the non-working videos in place.***

I’m old enough to remember a time when the word ‘bad‘ meant ‘not good‘ or ‘horrible‘. Pop culture thought it would be cute to blur the meaning. ‘Bad‘ came to mean ‘Good‘ and being a ‘goody, goody‘ or a ‘Good Girl‘ became an insult. Things have only gotten worse over the years, today ‘Hot‘, ‘Stoopid‘, ‘That’s What’s Up‘, ‘Bangin‘ and other words and phrases have taken bad’s place implying good.

Nothing personifies pop culture more than MTV which announced today the ratings for the 2007 VMA broadcast. As reported by PR newswire, MTV said the show’s ratings were “up 23% from last year” (2006 was one of the worst rated VMAs ever). Traffic to MTV.com was up as well, setting a record for the most visitors in a single day to the site.

What does ‘UP’ mean? The blogsphere, the music press and friends both within and without the industry all seemed to pretty roundly express that the show was very bad — as in really bad like, it sucked. Does up mean down at MTV? Does the network care that people tuned in for Britney’s comeback and turned away scratching their heads at a pretty poor performance? As long as people tuned in, that’s good, left? Oops, I mean, right?

The usually humorous, Sara Silverman opened the show with tasteless, gutter-humor going so far as to call Britney Spears young children “mistakes” that look like the “hairless vagina they came out of”. Do we really make fun of 1 and 2 year old children? MTV had a year to prep the show and all the writers could think of was that? Her opening tanked and was the flattest, least rememorable opening that I can recall from any show in the past 10 years.

Much like Caitlin Upton, the tounge-tied, geographically challenged beauty queen from South Carolina (that MTV chose to prominently feature) MTV has lost its way, while proclaiming to have found it. The network has succeeded in putting together a show that garnered high ratings for being bad, not the good bad — but the terrible bad.

MTV’s ratings increase is no different than Caitlin Upton’s. Sure 20 million people watched her video gaffe over the past 2 weeks, but they watched for all the wrong reasons — it wasn’t a compliment. Likewise, MTV’s ratings were up, but the public didn’t enjoy the show. Should that be celebrated?

We love our stars. We love Justin, FF, Kanye, Chris Brown and all of the other talented artists that we tuned in to watch and hear. Why didn’t MTV let us watch them? Why were all of the songs in the suites cut off before the end? Why cut away from Kanye performing the current #1 song in the country to watch Mark Ronson (whom I love as a DJ) impersonate Kevin Eubanks?!?

We know that MTV feels ‘people don’t want to watch videos anymore’ and thus they produce all of these ridiculous train wreck reality shows. But, on the one night of the year that real music fans actually want to tune in enjoy the artists that the network has forgotten about, MTV’s production team chooses to keep us from actually seeing them, except for small Attention Deficit Disorder tid-bits. In the immortal words of Justin Timberlake, “I challenge MTV to play more videos”!

I’m Bad - LL Cool J music video 1987

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I can remember LL Cool J proclaiming, “I’m Bad” as in ‘he’s good’. MTV’s pretty hip, so for the uninitiated, allow me to translate their proclamation that ‘our ratings are up, thank God’. The common sense English translation is: The VMA ratings set a 10 year low last year, they are up this year, thank Britney.

MTV, in this case up isn’t up, its down. But bad is the just plain ‘ole, back in the day, not hip, old school, pre-LL Cool J bad.

*** By the way, we’ve found your next Caitlin Upton ***

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