MTV2 hates me

I can’t find the excellent Rolling Stone article that alerted me to what, exactly, it was that MTV2 was morphing into, so I’ll link to a weblog called Let it be known!, since they have the details right and an attitude not dissimilar to mine.

Let’s get this out of the way: MTV2 was a 24 hour music channel for maybe five years.  Of course, there were patented 6-minute commercial breaks in the mix, but other than that, it was all music videos.

I think I first noticed not-videos (what’s on?  NOT VIDEOS) when they started showing Beavis and Butthead reruns.  I wouldn’t complain about that, since I’m a huge Beavis fan from way back.  And there’s videos in each episode. 

Well, at the end of January, they announced a format change, and I’m not digging it so far.  They’ve focused the playlist, apparently, to straight-up hip hop and rock.  So you won’t see Maroon 5, or maybe you will… okay, no Kelly Clarkson.  (But that song is catchy.)

And they’ve added interstitials.  You know, MTV used to have little short / animated / interesting ads for itself before and after each break?  Well, now there are just two minute movies about, well, whatever, eating up valuable videos time.  Not videos, in other words.

Here’s the other thing, though: they’ve gone to a whole new aesthetic of information design.  You know the song/album/label/director info you’d get at the start and end of each video?  In tasteful white-on-black, in a pretty easy to read font?  It’s been replaced by three bars, which start by representing three of those four pieces of information, and then one of the bars changes to the information they hadn’t imparted, and the bar is pink, or yellow, and the text is something similarly high-contrast and annoying.  What’s the idea?  Do 12-24s really enjoy this kind of thing?

Oh, and the middle bar occasionally pops up with an inane random question or sentence blurt.  "What are hot dogs made of?"  "Magazines always tell the truth."  Over the center of the screen.  At the half-way point of a video’s playtime.  I can’t even describe how annoying it is: it tells the audience "are you paying attention to this video?  You shouldn’t."  It sends a signal about the artist, song and video: this is silly shit.  You’re watching MTV2.  That’s the important thing.

Tell you what it might be: it’s nearly impossible to fast-forward through (via TiVo) a two-hour block of MTV2 and tell what you have or haven’t seen.  The introduction text-info-bars are on screen for what seems about half the time the old white text was, so the distinction between videos and commercials is that much harder to make.

I might switch my 2-hours-of-TiVo recording over to MTV for a while (but from 4 to 6, I still caught a lot of Cribs, or game shows I couldn’t understand).  If that doesn’t get me my fix, I’m not beyond switching to Fuse or VH1, even though I’m not Canadian or 40.