Culture Shock 08.11.11: Does anyone really still want their MTV?

"I am The Great Cornholio!"

Aug. 1 marked the 30th birthday of MTV, not that you'd know that from watching MTV. The network's birthday passed virtually unremarked.

Maybe that's because MTV, a channel identified with youth and youth culture, can't bring itself to admit it has entered adulthood. If real life were "Logan's Run," MTV would be running for Sanctuary.
Or maybe it's just that there isn't much to celebrate now that MTV is little more than the shambling zombie husk of the once vibrant, groundbreaking cable station that helped define the 1980s.

MTV has been on the receiving end of jokes for so long, it's hard even to recall, much less appreciate, just how relevant it once was. Professional "concerned parents" used to drum up hysteria about how "Beavis and Butt-Head" and racy Madonna videos were corrupting an entire generation. (Generation X turned out just fine. Thanks for asking.) Now, the most controversy MTV can manage is a few critics writing boilerplate articles about whether "Jersey Shore" makes everyone from New Jersey look bad or is offensive to Italian Americans.

Well, it does make Jersey look bad, but we've all got our stereotypes to bear, OK?

And if you are looking for a music video that tries way too hard to be edgy and "transgressive," well I suppose you can find some of Lady Gaga’s on the Internet. But you won't find them on MTV, which stopped airing music videos so long ago that the joke about there being no music on Music Television stopped being funny a decade ago.

But, hey, at least Mike Judge is back. After 13 seasons of "King of the Hill" on Fox — a successful run by any standard, but a wildly successful one given Fox's track record of canceling shows — he has returned to MTV with new episodes of "Beavis and Butt-Head." And this time around, Beavis and Butt-Head will be making fun on MTV’s current programming, including "Jersey Shore."

That merits repeating: Two animated cartoon characters once thought to be horrible, even dangerous role models for children will be dishing out insults at the expense of a cast of flesh-and-blood cartoon characters, one of whom looks like an Oompa Loompa.

What do you get from too much MTV? A pain in the neck and an IQ of three.

At 30, MTV looks old, tired, worn out. It's like 30 is the new 80. And for being MTV's signature show, "Jersey Shore" isn't even all that distinctive. Every cable channel has some fake "reality" show about awful people, whether it's "The Real Housewives" or "Mob Wives" or "Keeping Up with the Kardashians." It's all so homogenized, I had to double check that "Jersey Shore" is an MTV show. It could easily be on E! or Bravo or SyFy or History or any of a dozen channels that, like MTV, no longer have anything to do with their name or initials.

We're far removed from when MTV invented the modern reality TV show with "The Real World," which, now a quaint relic, is entering its 26th season — another zombie that just won't die.

And the days when MTV's music videos provided a new and exciting artistic format, which served as a proving ground for future movie directors like Spike Jonze ("Where the Wild Things Are"), Michel Gondry ("Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") and David Fincher ("Fight Club"), are now the stuff of legend.

Thirty years after it shook the world, MTV looks like just another cable channel that has lost its identity. Sure, people still watch. But it's just not important anymore.

MTV: Still not killing the culture no matter how much it sucks now

Are they the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or do they just

suck?

So, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse won, like, a third of the awards at last night's MTV Movie Awards.

(That one-third figure is an estimate. I haven't had enough coffee yet for basic math. Here, you can add it up yourself.)

Between that and the baleful influence of Jersey Shore, I have become what I once hated. I've become one of those stodgy adults who thinks MTV is killing Western Civilization as we know it.

Nearly 30 years after MTV debuted, we've come full circle. Only now, instead of sexy videos ruining the culture, it's just endless crap: Team Edward, Team Jacob, Team Guido. Granted, I am aware that my sense of MTV-induced societal collapse is entirely a figment of my imagination, just as it was illusory when parents, pundits, and professional bedwetters complained about MTV back in the 1980s and early '90s.

But at least I have an appreciation now for why all of those anti-MTV voices felt the way they did: It was an aesthetic thing.

Here's my hypothesis: MTV's critics thought the music videos MTV played back then were raunchy, and, besides that, they hated the music, anyway. So, anything that aesthetically displeasing had to be bad for you.

Similarly, I look at a network that airs Jersey Shore and celebrates Twilight, and a little voice in my head tells me this insipid crap must be dumbing down the culture.

It doesn't matter that there's no empirical evidence for that. It doesn't matter that TV, overall, is more complex and requires more viewer investment than ever before. (TV shows from TV's "golden age" are really pretty simple. Compare Gunsmoke to Lost.) It doesn't matter that all of the stats show that pathologies like teen pregnancy and teen crime have been going down over the past 30 years. That voice in the back of my head won't shut up.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but it's important: Just because it's crap doesn't mean it's actually bad for you.