Time was, Music Television would attempt to live up to its name, but as we all know, that didn’t quite work out. It was still okay to be a music fan and watch television, though, because VH1 had come out of nowhere, decided to stop airing Celine Dion video after Bryan Adams video, and put together some heady, insightful shows about music. Sure, they continued to stubbornly insist on making every other week into Fashion Week, but that’s territory for our Fashion Editor (he’s very shy and doesn’t come out often).
Unfortunately, the smart stuff seems to be going the way of the dinosaur and Dinosaur Jr. Crossroads didn’t last because it played music videos, which apparently are horrible for ratings. Pop-Up Video is sadly on the decline because the highly sardonic jabs that make it so much fun to watch alienated some of the big names (Elton John and Billy Joel, among many others) that the network can’t afford to alienate. Storytellers offered intimate glimpses into the personalities of, among others, Dave Matthews, Billy Corgan, Michael Stipe, and (my favorite) the duo of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, but it’s taken a reduced role for reasons unknown. Hard Rock Live can’t last because it too closely resembles music videos. The sad lesson here is that, just maybe, Music and Television can’t live with each other, as great as it is when they do. They’re the Liam and Noel of entertainment, if you will.
On the other hand, the countless primetime celebrity-studded episodes of The List have seamlessly combined the inconsequential opinionating of the 100 Greatest specials with the inarticulate shouting matches of Jerry Springer. But that combination isn’t even as entertaining as I made that sound. In fact, all the episodes of The List combined have produced exactly one (1) funny moment: when host Charles Barkley, with stern seriousness in his eyes, threatened to fight Verne Troyer-that’s the midget of Mini-Me fame-over whether the greatest music video of all time was “Thriller” or “Hungry Like the Wolf.” And it wasn’t funny ha-ha.
And now we have Jeff Bridges-the Dude himself-trying to tell us with a straight face that Creedence Clearwater Revival didn’t make one of the greatest 100 albums in the past forty-odd years.
Although the greatest rock albums seems the most interesting discussion of the bunch to this writer, its unoriginal production makes it seem like an afterthought compared to the 100 Greatest lists done to that point: Songs, Artists, Women, Moments on TV, Dance Songs, and Hard Rock Artists. By the time they composed The Top 100 Greatest Albums of Rock-n-Roll, VH1 had it down to a science: lots of promotional photos that look authentic (to create the impression that the network is way on the inside), lots of “expert” celebrity opinions (never mind the excessive overlap of interview footage between all of VH1′s interview-based specials), and clips of songs you don’t normally hear on TV. Even though the Greatest Albums is nearly a carbon copy of all the other Greatest specials, the formula still works. Hey, I watched it.
Never mind that ranking So, Peter Gabriel’s one of his spottiest albums (and certainly his sappiest), at #90 and ahead of seminal releases by R.E.M. (Murmur at #92), Radiohead (OK Computer at #94), and the Jackson Five (ABC at #98) automatically negates some fundamental law of human decency. It’s simply the appeal of seeing your favorite artists-and Alice Cooper, too-comment on a bunch of albums you should already own, except maybe for Dusty in Memphis.
I mean, nowhere else on the planet can you find out such incisive and analytical content as Art Garfunkel’s take on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours: “Rumours is a great rock album..[he pauses here momentarily; it is clear that he is choosing each word with the utmost care].because Fleetwood Mac were a great rock band.” And he sits back in his chair, smirking, confident that he’s laid down the final word on the subject.
Whoa! Easy there, Art! Somebody grab a hold of that crazy old man before the limb breaks and he shatters a hip! Seriously, this is the kind of insipid commentary that viewers would have no part of if it weren’t accompanied by a face as recognizable as Garfunkel’s. (Um, maybe that was a bad example, since I personally had to look at the name at the bottom of the screen. Ol’ Artie has indeed, shall we say, fallen far off the tree in recent years.)
Point is, the lists aren’t by any means definitive, authoritative, researched in-depth, or even produced creatively. But I watched it. And if you were a music fan with nothing to do last week, you watched it too, because Music Television does have a market, even if it’s four parts Television and one part Music.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 2nd, 2001 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Cadenza. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.