News of the Monoculture

Today in Tedium: I remember the day well. In 1994, I was watching MTV on a small television set in my kitchen, at which point “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was playing. I loved “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I’m pretty sure I turned it up. Even though it was probably one of the network’s most-played videos, I always wished MTV would play it more. But what I saw after that video shook me more than anything else I can think of. The news that Kurt Cobain had committed suicide was one of the indelible memories of growing up, and I learned about it from my generation’s Edward R. Murrow, Kurt Loder. (Unlike you, I did not get a trigger warning.) I was a news junkie who watched CNN for hours, but I cannot think of a moment growing up that grabbed me quite like that one. I think it can be lost in the 21st century just how much something like MTV News mattered to us. It exposed us to a kind of culture that was sometimes hard to find in suburbia, or in small towns. Today, we take for granted that we can find our tribes anywhere on the internet. But in the early ’90s, MTV News was what we had. And as MTV News shutters, today’s Tedium ponders why this outlet mattered to so many people. RIP MTV News, you were the best. — Ernie @ Tedium

Why MTV News and The Week in Rock somehow transcended their original mission

Above is one of the very first promos for The Week in Rock, which was MTV’s flagship news program throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The promo clearly suggests something light and topical, but basically just another interview show in a sea of interview shows.

But somehow, in just a few years, the show gained an unusual gravitas that somehow transcended its subject matter. Sure, it was a show about music that was heavy on press junkets. But really, it was a show about being young and culturally aware at a time when cultural awareness was rare.

One thing that helped is that Loder, a rock-music lifer who was already roughly twice the age of the average MTV viewer when he took the anchor desk in 1987, was as close to an elder statesman as music journalism had to offer at the time. (Apologies to Robert Christgau.) Loder had been writing for music magazines for many years, culminating in a long run at Rolling Stone starting in 1979, during which he helped Tina Turner write her autobiography. He knew the scene, and could talk about it with authority. He was not picked from the masses. He was no Jesse Camp.

Kurt Loder, as seen in 2015. It always blows people’s minds how much older he is than you remember. He’s 78 years young. (montclairfilmfest/Flickr)

And given that his background was mostly in magazines rather than newspapers, where having a strong opinion on things wasn’t frowned upon, he somehow managed to cut a reputation as a news anchor who could be “outspoken” about things, a rarity in his day. In a January 1991 interview with the Los Angeles Daily News, he criticized his own network for putting boring videos on the air, while banning interesting and provocative ones—like Madonna’s “Justify My Love.”

“It’s a fight. I mean, it would be nice to see the William Burroughs video, for instance, on MTV,” Loder said. “The limitations are puzzling. There are all these things you can’t say, show or even suggest.”

(Loder has carried this rep to the modern day, and gained a reputation in his later years for his libertarian views. Nowadays, Loder contributes to Reason as a film reviewer.)

One of the other nice things about MTV during this period is that the network benefited from an ecosystem. Bands would visit the MTV studio; MTV would land at large festivals or at shows on tour. They’d interview random concert-goers, or have an extended conversation backstage about music, and that footage would eventually find its way on the air a year later. And it was clear that quite a lot of B-roll was shot during these appearances—if you combined Heavy Metal Parking Lot and This is Spinal Tap, but played it 100 percent seriously and realistically, you would get a huge chunk of MTV News.

MTV would gradually build a news operation around Loder, bringing in personalities like John Norris, Allison Stewart, and Tabitha Soren. Later, Channel One News anchor Serena Altschul became a prominent face on MTV News.

While this network and this show was supposedly about popular music, MTV News and The Week in Rock quickly became about culture at large. Soren, a former NYU student who appeared briefly in one of MTV’s most famous videos, The Beastie Boys’ “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party),” often found herself doing political coverage. As a 1992 New York Magazine article noted, the fact that MTV was doing campaign trail coverage caught fellow journalists off-guard at times:

A correspondent from one of the old-line networks who encountered Soren in New Hampshire was startled to learn that the music-television channel had a news department, let alone that it was commit-ted to campaign coverage through Election Day—information that may also surprise viewers when they see Soren jostling with the other mike-toters at the Garden. But then, who’s to say who is a political journalist these days? Or, for that matter, what qualifies as a news network? Maria Shriver is NBC’s podium reporter, and most of NBC’s live convention coverage will show up on PBS.

(I bet an old-line network correspondent fainted when they learned BuzzFeed had a news operation.)

Now, granted, MTV News was a support apparatus for a music network, one that carried all the messiness and conflicts of interests that come with that role. And that meant that there were often things the network had to do that didn’t strictly fit the news bucket. One can argue that the heavy promotion of the Video Music Awards, the MTV Movie Awards, and Rock the Vote occasionally went a bit afield from news coverage into promotional material or even straight-up advocacy. (The internet would further blur these lines.)

As imperfect as the network sometimes could be, MTV News proved an essential tool, one that did more than give the four minutes before the top of the hour a framing element.

But as popular culture changed, the surrounding network was ill-equipped to adapt. Having Kurt Loder and Allison Stewart and John Norris in your back pocket could only do so much when disruption was pushing your network into different directions that were completely incompatible with your news outlet’s mission.

You’ll notice that I’m largely focused on MTV News’ first decade. That is not an indictment of its later history, but a reflection that this is the period in which the network’s news coverage had its largest impact. (There were some great journalists in its later years, such as Gideon Yago, who brought a serious news mindset to the network amid the Iraq War, and the radio host Sway, who took on the Kurt Loder role for MTV after Loder left.) That MTV News survived as long as it did is a nod to the fact that the network’s past once meant something. That it’s finally going away shows that the past only goes so far when money is on the line.