Boston Globe - December 2, 2001
MTV's blasts from the past By Hayley Kaufman, Globe Staff
A funny thing happened the other night when I turned on MTV.
I saw a video.
Seriously, it was an entire video. Start to finish. I even saw the little blurb that runs in white, sans-serif type in the bottom left-hand corner and bookends the song - you remember - with the name of the artist, the album, the label, everything. Videos have become something of an endangered species on MTV in recent years, so I stood there, happily stunned and gaping, in front of my 27-inch Sony. I glanced at the clock. It was just after 8. Prime time. Strange.
The video was of Britney Spears, writhing like a soft-porn star to her new single ''I'm a Slave 4 U,'' a song I usually find about as gripping as a traffic report for roads I don't travel. But seeing her video - now this was interesting. Notable. I was entranced, mesmerized.
Ah yes, I thought, this was how video killed the radio star.
And then the craziest thing happened. The song ended, and another video started. And then another. And another.
For more than an hour, I gawked at videos. Yeah, I saw a whole bunch of ads, too, along with a quickie MTV News segment and a public-service announcement. But the 65 minutes was mostly videos. Several nights later, it was the same thing. Loud, ridiculous, wonderful videos by rap-metal outfits and hip-hop bands and girl-fronted power-pop acts. It was great, like being 15 again without midterms or the pressure to lose my virginity.
It was, in a word, rad.
But it was also odd. Over the 20 years of its existence, MTV has filled more and more of its 24-hour programming with distinct, nonvideo shows. There have been cartoons (''Beavis and Butt-Head,'' ''Daria''). Game shows (''Singled Out,'' ''Say What? Karaoke''). Insipid treks to spring-break hot spots. And, of course, reality shows (''The Real World,'' ''Road Rules''), a genre so successful it leapt to other channels and, for a mercifully brief time, became almost inescapable. Meanwhile, the videos that were once the thumping heart of the music station - and the bane of every parent in the '80s - seemed to disappear.
The folks at MTV are notoriously difficult to get hold of, every call routed and transferred from assistant to assistant until the caller is so deep in the phone tree she needs a firefighter and a ladder truck to get back out. So it didn't surprise me much that several calls and a fax bearing the rather mundane question ''Hey, why so many videos again, guys?'' yielded little by way of response. The truth is, I don't begrudge them their elusiveness. If you had zillions of adolescents calling you every day - as MTV no doubt does - trying to get their bands heard, videos seen, and love letters to 'N Sync and Pink and Carson Daly read, you wouldn't pick up the phone either.
Finally, however, one person in MTV's upper management team gave me a few insights. No, the network is not running more videos, nor is it headed back to its original programming style, but, yes, it may be testing more video-heavy shows in prime time.
I asked whether that might be a cost-saving strategy, since Viacom, MTV's parent company, slashed the network's staff by 9 percent at the end of October. Ad revenue has been limp, after all, and video blocks might be cheaper to produce than fleshy spring-break specials and silly game shows.
Not an effective strategy, I was told. According to the ratings, when MTV runs videos - entire videos, not the bits and pieces it has been running in recent years - the station loses viewers.
The MTV audience, the insider explained, can't sit through a whole video anymore.
Oh. My. God.
Three and half minutes. They can't sit through 3 1/2 minutes of bumping and grinding and throbbing beats and wailing guitars.
Whoa.
If the kids and adolescents MTV is now trying to reach can't sit through a whole video, we should all be a little nervous. For the future of civilization, I mean. I guess I'm an old fogy now, having spent several formative years slack-jawed in front of MTV before aging into the VH1 demographic. But the old fogy in me felt kind of queasy when I heard that tidbit.
Dwindling attention spans or not, it seems clear that, for whatever reason, the demise of the MTV video has been greatly exaggerated. In the past couple of weeks, I've seen dozens, more than I've seen in years. Videos for Linkin Park, Alien Ant Farm, Nickelback, Incubus, blink-182, Sum 41, and loads of other bands favored by skateboarding, new-metal-listening teenage boys. There've been tons of hip-hop videos as well, with hourlong blocks featuring Ja Rule, Juvenile, Ludacris, and Faith Evans.
The VJs who used to introduce videos and shows haven't surfaced much while I've been watching. And the cool, arty bits that used to run between the ads and the videos have all but disappeared. But all in all, it's been pretty entertaining, watching these gorgeous or eye-popping or goofy little film clips again.
And who knows? Maybe by watching a few full-length videos, MTV's young target viewers are lengthening their attention spans.