Bob Warring: The MTV generation and a distorted reality

I don't want my MTV, at least not anymore.

What started out as a harmless, even moderately entertaining vehicle to boost album sales of the talented and quasi-talented alike has grown into... well, just what the hell is this thing we call "MTV?"

At first, comparisons to Frankenstein (the monster, not Victor himself) and The Blob come to mind.

Like Frankenstein, MTV had morally ambiguous origins and only later proved to be a truly pernicious entity. Frankenstein may have been a product of dabbling in the black arts, but such a creation would nevertheless hold value in the realm of medical science, if nothing else.

Since the airing of its first video, the strangely prophetic, frequent-Quizzo-answer "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, MTV has always seemed to give a bit too much airtime to those on the fringes of "talent."

Nonetheless, we must remember that the video, at least at its inception, held the potential to become a worthwhile artistic supplement to the music it accompanied. This statement remains true regardless of the fact that the marriage of video and music was only truly mastered by Van Halen.

But MTV's similarities with Frankenstein end there. Frankenstein's malice stemmed from the overpowering agony of repeated rejections by his creator; MTV is just evil.

The likening of MTV to The Blob is actually much more apt. The Yahoo! Movies synopsis of The Blob says it all: "A mass from outer space grows in proportion to the number of humans it devours."

Yeah, I'd say that's about right.

MTV saps our minds, our culture and our money. Its ever-tightening stranglehold on the right to tell impressionable adolescents and young adults what's cool and what's not breeds uniformity like something out of Brave New World.

Its position as the purveyor of teen pop culture makes the clothing and shoe ads it runs seem like gospel: to be cool is to look like the people on MTV. If your family doesn't have the money to buy these things for you, that's okay. You can always get a part-time job.

In short, MTV epitomizes everything wrong with our generation: fluff.

It purports to be socially conscious, but its posturing is a thin facade. MTV News provides an undeniably leftist spin on such events as the protests at last week's World Economic Forum in New York, yet when watching MTV, one knows that a commercial for The Gap -- perhaps the most notorious exploiter of sweatshops among large clothing companies -- can never be far away.

Initiatives undertaken by MTV to make themselves appear more conscientious are just that -- oversimplified, transparent attempts to further an appearance. The basic idea of these programs stems from beliefs that are just and worthy, but in practice they are structured to provide the fast and easy answers we crave. In other words, they're fluff.

"Rock the Vote" encourages young people to vote, but it fails to place necessary emphasis on making a conscientious, informed decision. Voting for the sheer sake of voting seems downright dangerous.

These MTV programs always seem incomplete and half-hearted. When MTV united the mothers of slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls at the 1999 MTV Video Music Awards, they passed up a dazzling opportunity to advance the "Stop the Violence" coalition. Rather than asking the mothers to effectively denounce violence to a nationwide audience of impressionable youth, MTV instead had the two women give out the award for best rap video.

But if you really want to know what MTV's about, watch an episode of The Real World.

I'm sure you've all seen it, but just to summarize, MTV takes a handful of attractive college-aged men and women, puts them up in a multi-million dollar suite and videotapes the misadventures that ensue as they hang out and party, since none of them have jobs.

You know, like in the real world.

MTV pretends to be implicitly advocating acceptance of diversity by including an African-American and a homosexual, but the characters are generally stereotypes. It's apparent that they are only added because they promise to fuel the fights that keep the show's viewers watching. It's clear-cut tokenism. MTV would like us to think that it is promoting diversity, but in the end its only presenting these people for our ridicule.

Fluff, fluff, fluff.

Video killed the radio star, and then MTV killed the video (or at least banished it to MTV2).

Who will kill MTV? Bob Warring is a senior History and English major from Hanover, PA.

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