MTV sucks.

There's really no denying it.

The goal of this webpage will be to get the word out, and somehow make MTV realize that it is now horrible.

So, I have compiled this webpage of links, facts, and thoughts to help you,
the MTV viewer, make our once-cool network cool again.


Here are the various sections of the page :
Facts

Thoughts

The Latest Transgression :
"Swordfish" Cribs - MTV's role as advertiser

Past Transgressions

Links

Misc.



Here are the Facts:

I have heard from two sources that Britney Spears got breast implants when she was like 16.
That's not really MTV sucks news, but it relates to a current mainstay of MTV's suckiness.

Here's a pic of Britney Spears from a few years ago. It speaks for itself. Click on it for a full sized image.

I analyzed the TV listings of the week of June 27 - July 3 (1999) to see how much of MTV is actually music.
Here are my conclusions :

Out of 168 hours in the week, MTV had no music at all for 62 of them, with stuff like Loveline, the Blame Game, Fanatic, and others. That accounts to about 37% of the week.

The rest was music, but 64 hours, about 38%, was what I consider "Rehash Shows." These are shows like Isle of MTV, the Countdowns, TRL, and stuff like that, that are basically just the same videos, with lots of talking in between. The countdowns often have bits from the videos only a few seconds long, and Isle of MTV has tons of segments with interviews and stuff. So if I actually measured amount of videos on the channel, it would be much lower. I also neglected commercials, about 10-20 minutes per hour.

The other 52 our of 168 hours are new music, like Spankin' New, AMP, and 120 Minutes. This is about 31% of the channel. So very little of the channel is actually new and different music. A few times, there are big blocks without videos, like from 8:30 Sunday morning to Midnight the next day day. Yow. And TRL, the Countdowns, and Isle of MTV are repeated. So that 3 hours is shown again and again each day, further skewing results.
That sucks.

I'll do a more up to date analysis soon.  I assure you however, that the numbers for today are similar.



Thoughts:
I do indeed have some thoughts. First, I've heard the station called Empty-V a lot, and it seems to be very accurate.

MTV has very little music programming anymore. For example today, (some day in summer '99) MTV was on in my room. The Pick a VJ thing was on for hours, then Rock and Jock, the Grind, Loveline, etc. So I saw no videos the entire day. Odd, since the purpose of Music Television was to show us videos (or at least I thought).

Even if there are videos, they're crap. Britney Spears, N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez. I have a theory about them, the one helps the other, like they are reactions. I think the happy/shitty boy bands and Britney Spears/Mariah Carey/TLC-ish music is a reaction to the not-so-great hard music like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Staind, and Kid Rock and stuff, and vice versa. Even though Jesse Camp is pretty much a fraud, (my roommate's sister went to school with him at an extremely expensive prep school in Conneticut a couple years ago), at least he's right about rock and roll dying. The only "rock and roll" is awful stuff like Korn and Marilyn Manson.  If that's rock and roll, then we're in trouble.

Take Jennifer Lopez for example. "Hey look I'm hot and Latin." I really doubt she would sell many records if she was fat and ugly, and being "Latin" is the trend now. It's like me cashing in on a "We Love Irish Stuff" trend or something. Hey look, I have red hair, I'm Irish, you ought to like me! And she's so shamelessly self-promoting, just like the other Boy Bands and her partner in crime, Britney Spears. It's music by committee, and it's all there is. MTV doesn't play anything else that's new and different. The last video I saw that I thought was new and different, seriously, was Alanis Morrisette's "You Oughta Know." When it came out, there was nothing like it. And look what they did to her, they overplayed her to the point of ridiculousness.

Check out this page making fun of boy bands and other bad music, it's pretty good.

But this webpage is not about ridiculing music I don't like. It's about MTV being bad, supporting bad music, and not playing very much music anyway.
go to top



The Latest Transgression:
(that means "bad thing" for those of you who don't know)

This section is intended to be a running commentary on stupid stuff I've seen on MTV.

The Transgression, as of 6-15-01:

    I had MTV on while I was doing other stuff in my room.  I was hoping to see videos, but of course that's a foolish thing to hope for.  So on came a "Special Edition" of Cribs, which I must admit is a kind of amusing show, sometimes.  Not as good as videos, but still.  This was the "Swordfish" edition, where MTV followed around the stars of "Face-Off," I mean "Swordfish," starring John Travolta and Halle Barry and Hugh Jackman, who is aparently famous now.  So they went to John Travolta's plane, saw his cars, went shopping with Barry and Jackman, and then to the house of the director, some fat guy.  First, why not just go to Barry or Jackman's house? Why shopping?  But that's beside the point.  What pissed me off was the fact that this show, like much of MTV, was just a big advertisement for the movie.  I don't have proof or anything, but I'm certain that the movie company paid MTV to hype it's stupid-looking action flick.  Clips from the movie were liberally shown during the show, as well as a lengthy and favorable description of the movie, making sure to show Halle Barry in a bra about nine times.  While this doesn't really make me mad alone, besides not being videos, it's representative of MTV serving as hype factory for anything aimed at a "youth audience."  I don't know how many times I've seen the MTV Spring Break or Beach House or some other thing being hosted by some actors from a new movie, with the name of the movie repeated over and over, plus lots of clips and bits about the movie thrown in.  Like a talk show.  What's so bad about that?  Well, simply put, movies aren't music.  The M in MTV stands for Music, not Movies-Aimed-at-a-Youth-Audience.  When I watch MTV, I want to see music, or at least musicians (the loosest sense of the word if you include Britney Spears et al), not actors from some movie that paid MTV for hype.  But this isn't limited to movies.  I remember a few months ago when those stupid two-way pagers first came out, Carson Daly and some other people were using them on TRL.  Carson and whoever else were saying how fun these things were, "wow look how cool this is I am messaging such and such," and making sure to say the brand of the pager a bunch of times.  Thankfully, I forgot the brand, so your ad didn't sink in.  But in any case, it's like MTV is a giant billboard masquerading as a TV station for young people, manufacturing hype and trends to sell advertisers' products.  That sucks.  Where's the music??



Links:
First, the important one : MTV's Comments page
Leave your comments as much as possible. Remember, "you guys suck," while it's true, may not help that much.

And the regular old MTV Webpage.
Here is where you can get ammunition for your tirades. Oh where is the cool mtv we remember

Questions of the MTV kind
Questions of the MTV kind : a small page with some funny MTV jokes.

Two nice little MTV sucks pages.
No. 2 and No. 1
Lots of interesting bits, though they're both kind of out of date and some of the arguments are a little odd.

An MTV Diatribe
Another small page about MTV sucking by a guy with a big vocabulary apparently
 

And the "_____ Sucks" pages. Some little bits about MTV sucking

Crappy movies:actually has a few things about MTV
The official Diadem Suck page : more little bits
Stuff that sucks : see above
 

Here are some letters I received from people who disagree with me about MTV sucking. Take a look.

go to top



thanks to MTV Sucks for this gif

Whatever happened to the cool old MTV?? Remember this sort of stuff?
(swiped from the MTV Online webpage)


?

go to top

Thanks everyone.
Andrew Wiseman
squidpants@aol.com

Back to my homepage

Thanks to Counter people for visiting my site