I Want My MTV (87 page)

 

KEVIN POWELL:
In September of '92, we were flown to LA for the VMAs. You're talking Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana, Howard Stern—and then the cast of
The Real World
. And I swear, bro, the fans screamed for us as if we were the Beatles. That's when I really knew the show was a game-changer.

 

NICK RHODES:
That's really when MTV ended. That's when it became entirely crap.

 

SIMON LE BON:
When you saw
The Real World
, you knew it was gone.

JONATHAN MURRAY:
When
The Real World
debuted in 1992, MTV was still mostly music videos. In fact, the show sometimes began at three minutes before the hour, or three minutes after the hour, depending on when a music video ended. When the first episode aired, we came out of a 0.3 rating for the videos, and
The Real World
popped to a 0.9. We tripled our lead-in.

 

ERIC NIES:
We each made $1,400 for appearing on
The Real World
. It was
completely
unfair. That show made millions and millions of dollars for MTV. I made $1,400.

 

STEVE ISAACS:
I remember MTV saying there was no way to hold a steady rating when they played videos. If they played rock, rap fans would turn the channel, and vice versa. There was a schism in music.

 

KEN R. CLARK:
There was a time when I'd walk down a street in New York City wearing an MTV staff jacket, and people would yell, “Wow, man, MTV is so cool.” By the time we were airing
Real World
, people would yell “MTV sucks!” And a lot of us were starting to think it did.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
To show you what an idiot I am, when
The Real World
took off, I thought,
Well, this can only work once
. My thinking was, those kids who did the first season, they had zero expectations coming in. But since they'd become stars, the next group of kids were going to expect to become stars, too, and they'd be over the top and obnoxious and the audience wouldn't want to see that. Wrong! That's exactly what the audience wanted to see.

 

LAUREN CORRAO:
After the first season aired, kids wanted to be on the show as a means to an end. But that first group was not about that. We couldn't even get anyone to kiss on camera that season. And now look what happens on the show.

 

DAVE HOLMES:
Have you seen the first season of
The Real World
lately? It seems like a fucking Ken Burns documentary from today's perspective. The scenes and conversations go on forever. It's like, you can't believe how much shorter our attention spans have gotten since then.

 

JUDY McGRATH:
Academics were quick to latch on to
The Real World
. All of a sudden, I was getting invitations from universities, and people were writing that it was either the death of everything or the beginning of everything.

KEVIN POWELL:
Our season of
The Real World
opened a new chapter in television history. For our show to be part of American pop culture, that's incredible.

Still, it's a mixed bag. On the one hand, I'm proud when people say to me, “Your conversation about race had an impact on my life,” or “Norman coming out and being an openly gay male on TV had an impact on me.” That's important. But when people ask, “How can I get on reality TV?” I mean, come on, man. I'm in my forties. I've run for Congress twice. I could care less about that stuff.

 

NICK RHODES:
I saw a newspaper headline once that stuck with me: TOYS “R” US WANT TO GET OUT OF THE TOY BUSINESS. That's what happened to MTV. They wanted to get out of the music business.

 

LAUREN CORRAO:
I still feel a little guilty about being the one responsible for the non-music shows.

 

JOHN LACK:
The Real World
was the end of music as we know it on MTV.

 

DOUG HERZOG:
We didn't know what to do with the kids from the first season. We felt responsible for them. We gave Eric Nies a job hosting
The Grind
. We hired Julie Oliver in HR, but she started looking up all the executives' salaries and telling Bunim-Murray, so we fired her. Heather B worked on
Yo!
for a while. I bought a very bad painting from Norm.

 

 

 

 

 

 

TOM FRESTON:
I threw a ten-year anniversary party at the Tribeca Grill in 1991, and invited John Lack and Bob Pittman and all the executives. People who had passed through, and crashed and burned, and hated each other, they all came together this night. We were upstairs in a private room, drinking tequila shots.

 

FREDSEIBERT:
I was looking at all these old, rich people in suits, thinking,
Really? This is what I miss?

 

JOHN LACK:
Many of us hadn't been together for five, six years. For a lot of people, MTV was their Camelot. It was the greatest time of their lives.

 

TOM FRESTON:
I toasted John Lack as the father of MTV and gave him a bottle of champagne. He was so emotional, being publicly recognized once again, in front of those people, that he
was
indeed the guy who had the idea.

 

JOHN LACK:
After I left MTV, history got a little altered. Bob Pittman began to think that he created the thing, and he went around telling everybody that it was his idea. So when Tom introduced me, I think he wanted to set the record straight in front of everyone. And he did.

 

FRED SEIBERT:
Tom was fucking awesome about giving John his due. For the first time among his peers, it was publicly acknowledged that John maybe hadn't gotten the credit he deserved. And Bob raised his glass, too. It was good to get it out there like that, in front of everybody.

ROBERT MORTON:
When people were filing in, Pittman said to me, “Let's get crazy tonight.” Sure. No problem. So after I made my toast, I took my glass and threw it against a wall, thinking,
All right, this is crazy enough
. At which point sixty people started throwing glasses at the wall.

 

BOB PITTMAN:
One of the MTV traditions was that we would shoot tequila and break the shot glasses. At my going-away party at the Cadillac Bar and Grill, paramedics had to come and stitch up people's feet. The tenth anniversary party was at the Tribeca Grill, which is not the kind of restaurant where you throw glasses. But we all did, of course. Freston blamed it on me, which was okay, because he was still working there and I wasn't.

 

TOM FRESTON:
It was crazy. Soon, everyone was standing up and throwing their glasses. It was like a Greek wedding. Management ran in and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” We ended up getting thrown out of the Tribeca Grill that night. It made Page Six.

 

ROBERT MORTON:
I was producing
Late Night with David Letterman
. When I went back to the Tribeca Grill with friends, the owner, Drew Nieporent, didn't talk to me for years.
I
was the one Pittman blamed. He said
I
incited the breaking glass. That pussy hung me out to dry, but
he
incited the goddamn thing. I tease him about it every time I see him.

 

BRIAN DIAMOND:
Tom Freston had a great line that night. He stood up with John Lack on one said and Bob Pittman on the other side, and said, “MTV: It's a club you can't get into, and you can't get out of.”

 

 

 

 

 

INITIALLY, MTV WAS SOMETHING YOU COULD FIND ONLY
by watching MTV. As its influence spread, its uniqueness dissipated.

After MTV proved the value of a teen market, Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller launched the Fox network, which by 1993 had seven nights of prime-time programming, and launched beloved shows:
Married . . . with Children
,
21 Jump Street
,
The Arsenio Hall Show
,
The Simpsons
,
Beverly Hills 90210
,
Melrose Place
, and
The X-Files
. Robert Morton, an early MTV employee who left because he thought the network would fail, was executive producing
Late Night with David Letterman
, which brought anti-authoritarian absurdity to mainstream NBC. Specialization became rampant across cable—MTV's comedy programming had to compete with an entire comedy network, Comedy Central, and its news department vied with E! Entertainment Television for celebrity interviews.

Simultaneously, as MTV attitude became pervasive, videos began to feel commonplace. The idea of MTV—as something new and sheltered, hidden from adults or older siblings—had passed away; once the initial audience matured, the following wave of schoolkids didn't feel the same private delight. They had Nintendo and Sega, which revitalized home gaming; Mosaic soon made the Internet accessible. Active technology was supplanting passive technology. Offering MTV to a kid in 1993 was like offering a board game to a kid in 1981.

Also, videos had begun to lose their spark. Most of the people who created the video industry agree that by '92, the Golden Age was winding down. Videos were now carefully controlled by record labels, minimizing the chance of imaginative work. Large budgets substituted for fresh ideas. The arrival of digital editing, in the form of Avid, made it easy for directors to flit breathlessly between images. “Directors started putting as many cuts as they could into five seconds, but none of the cuts meant anything,” says David Mallet. “Music videos were the first genre to encompass nonlinear editing. That's when they started to go
bang bang bang bang bang.
It got hugely abused.”

Novice directors increasingly saw videos as a way to showcase their own talents, rather than the band; music video had become an internship for Hollywood employment. In December 1992, MTV began listing directors' names in chyron credits. Videos had been ads for a song, or a band, or a way of living and dressing. Now that their names were credited at the beginning and end of each video, directors were also making ads for an additional product: themselves.

The Golden Age—an era of creativity, invention, freedom, outrage, dancing zombies, bold hairstyles, profane VMA speeches, laughable costumes, cheesy special FX, midgets—came to a close. Rap videos, in particular, became more predictable and codified than hair metal videos ever were. Given the relative success of
The Real World
compared to MTV's ratings for video, the audience seemed to agree with comedian Denis Leary (
Newsday
called him “the most happening act on MTV right now”), whose lustful rants about Cindy Crawford in 1992 depicted her as the pinnacle of the network's content. “No MTV news, unless it's news about Cindy. No music, unless it's songs about Cindy,” Leary woofed.

Of all MTV's long-form programming,
The Real World
had the most tenuous connection to music. Its success speeded video's dismissal from MTV, and was bad news for record labels: MTV had thought to make themselves independent of the labels, but the labels never thought to make themselves independent of MTV. When MTV reduced the number of videos played per week, labels that once wanted nothing to do with the network felt betrayed by their unrequited devotion to MTV.

From humble beginnings twelve years earlier as the Cable Channel Least Likely to Succeed, MTV had spread its influence across TV, radio, advertising, film, art, and fashion. In a final display of potency, it proved influential in the election of Bill Clinton (who, given his attitude and sexual exploits, might be called “the first MTV president”). Once you've helped determine a presidential election, what's left? Another Winger video?

 

ABBEY KONOWITCH:
The Real World
turned television upside down. It was good for MTV, but it wasn't good for music. The scary thing, the most important thing to look at in this era, is the amount of power MTV had. We were perceived as the panacea for the record business. We were the crutch. If MTV played your video, you had a shot. If MTV didn't, you didn't. That was a flaw in the business. When MTV didn't play videos, the record industry suffered.

 

MIKE ROSS:
When they started to phase out videos, we ran up against some walls that irritated me. In 1993, they had one slot to add a rap video—it was either our Pharcyde video, “Passin' Me By,” or “Slam” by Onyx. Only
one
could get added. And they added “Slam.” It was a huge blow for us, and cost us a million, maybe two million, in record sales.

 

RICK RUBIN:
The labels became dependent on MTV, absolutely. Their entire marketing campaign was to make an expensive video, as though the fact that it was expensive solved the problem of there not being a great idea. So these expensive, mediocre things were being made, to get play on MTV, and then MTV started to go away. It caused a great deal of confusion. It's like, MTV changed everything when it came, and it changed everything when it left.

 

KEVIN GODLEY:
People got bored with music videos. Because—guess what?—they were boring. They were safe, they were the same, they were the results of marketing experiments as opposed to creative experiments. They were more to do with selling the artist than the song. They were more to do with sales than with art. It's always Art vs. Commerce, but in the beginning, art won out because commerce didn't understand it.