Alternative No More (MTV 2)

Member Name: Robert-K

Product:	MTV 2
Date:	10/02/03 (297 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Gonzo is somewhat entertaining

Disadvantages: Alienates it's originally intended audience totally and without reason, Plays approximately a sixth of it's original playlist, Obnoxious and irritating sense of humour

About three years ago, approximately, I had got onto the Sky Digital bandwagon, and quickly afterwards I found M2, a sister channel to MTV that seemd to be the alternative to MTV. It's unusual manner of video broadcasting, which allowed viewers, as well as musicians to choose their own music videos, and it's avaunt-garde style evident in it's "idents" and it's use of "clocks", counting down the seconds until a certain playlist was beginning while it showed the viewer's name and occupation, had me interested, and M2 soon became a favourite with me.

Sometime later, I had a sudden suprise as M2 changed to MTV 2, and it's style altered to 3DCGI flying blocks, however, it's style and manner never faltered. Until recently. It came slowly at first, when the viewer's choice and 2eclectic blocks were moved to sometime late at night, and the rest were filled with MTV2 Rocks, which played usually just nu-metal and commercial rock, the really tedious kind of stuff.

Then suddenly, MTV 2 changed entirely, into the mutinous, sickeningly demonic form it is now. Viewer's Choice, Artist's Choice, 2ecletic, even _The One Louder Zone_ disappeared suddenly, to be replaced with a anti-pop music variation on the current MTV itself: sickeningly commercial rock music, a massively cropped playlist that left several videos that usually played on MTV2 without airtime at all.

This is the form MTV 2 stands as today, a shadow of it's former self as an alternative to MTV 2, a rock music channel that can only be seperated from MTV Dance or MTV Base by the fact that they play "rock music", albeit in the same manner as these two other channels, as what they define rock is mostly processed commercial pap, with few diamonds shining through.

One of these diamonds could argurably be Gonzo, the channel's only block which is presented by a VJ, Zane Lowe. Zane has been with MTV since he starte
d presenting brand:new, back in 1997. Now he's the sole face of MTV 2, along with his jolly pirate club with jolly pirate nicknames(Ill Will, for instance...) in Gonzo. Zane seems to sometimes acknowledge the fact that MTV has been bad as of late, in a certain few comments he makes.

However, this isn't enough to outweigh the nasty elements for the show, and I'm not neccesarily referring to the fact that MTV 2 show lots of advertising now, even though they said they wouldn't a year ago.

Primarily, they're showing "humorous" inserts between music videos where they edit interviews from artists and bands, making them either say funny, or stupid things, or even worse, exhort how much they love MTV 2, obviously the channel talking for them.

In fact this has somewhat gone too far, as MTV 2 has recently started to mess with music videos themselves, editing them by making the artists in the videos lip-synch to unlikely songs, such as Anthony Kieldis in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against Avril Lavigne's soundtracking of "Complicated", or ABBA against Queens of the Stone Age. Even worse, music videos are edited to also make them sing nothing but "MTV 2" over and over again, inflicted upon The Electric Soft Parade, Coldplay, Sinead O Connor, and The Hives.

Unfortunately, this is even more moot with the fact that the music they play nowadays is nothing much but commercially orchestrated pap, or insipid punk, or irritating "teen rebellion". There are a few gems, but they're usually realtively old videos from commerically known, and critically safe bands. Alternative music truly doesn't exist anymore on MTV 2, except in quick thirty second flashes as part of Gonzo.

It seems now that MTV 2 has become the one thing you used to think it was rebelling against. A commercial music video channel playing only music that the record company exectives would think cool. Whoe
ver the people who host Gonzo call the "Funky Boss" must have been truly as funky as they say he is back in 1939.

Summary: