Al Gore at the Video Music Awards or How Lost is MTV?
MTV Music Awards, 2004: 10.3 million viewers
MTV Music Awards, 2005: 8.0 million viewers
MTV Music Awards, 2006: 5.77 million viewers
That is one telling statistic, in my opinion. On the year MTV celebrates their 25th Anniversary, they put together a stinker of a show that draws half the viewership they had just two years ago. Wow. The VMA’s used to be an event that I looked forward to for weeks in advance. This year I didn’t even know it was on until I caught a rerun of it three days later. Maybe we can blame Al Gore for this, maybe we can’t, but it’s something we should definitely think about.
Towards the end of the show- and I know because I caught this part -Al Gore comes on stage to deliver (VERBATIM) a part of his movie/slideshow “An Inconvenient Truth.” Yeah, good one. Here’s a crowd that just sat through Shakira’s hips and several dozen Panic At the Fall Out Boy acceptation speeches, and you bring out The Former Vice President for Life, Al Gore, to talk about global warming? The crowd cheered him, but only because most of the (non-celebrity) crowd was probably paid to be there.
They would have had to schedule a personal lap dance from Lil’ Kim (I like nasty girls) and a meet and greet with Lou Reed (who was also there for some reason) to get me to sit through that thing. (ON A SIDE NOTE: The whole night seems even more retarded when you consider that they got Jack White’s new outfit to be the “house band.” What a sad attempt at giving the show some “rock” cred. And what is Jack White’s deal? Lost a lot of points in my book, dude. Partly for that and partly because you’re new record has the worst album title of all time, “Broken Boy Soldiers”? What is that shit all about?).
Any hack could go on and on about how MTV doesn’t play music anymore and you could also make the case that music sucks nowadays in general, and both of those sentiments are equally true to a degree, but what it really comes down to is this: MTV is finally starting to lose it. People aren’t tuning in and with the rise of YouTube.com and even ITunes to an extent, they are no longer the barometer for popular music.
This is undeniably a good thing, but I’d wait a little longer before you break out the MTV is Dead piÃ?±ata. MTV is like a Gremlin, when it gets cut, it multiplies (See MTV 2). We have to be careful with this situation, no sudden movements.
Anyway, I actually caught the beginning of the show at another time over the weekend and I thought Jack Black’s intro song was actually kind of funny. So, I can’t knock the whole thing. Now if the VMA’s had been 3 hours of Jack Black and Tenacious D, Gnarls Barkley and The Raconteurs with Lou Reed, that would have been a show to watch. But MTV sprinkled in just enough fake rap, shitty pop and bogus power punk (emo, blah) for me to tune out. And, though it’s sad to say, I doubt I’ll be tuning in anytime soon.
