it’s very amusing to me that the joke is no longer that MTV doesn’t show music videos. It isn’t even mocking people who are still surprised or angry that MTV doesn’t show music videos anymore. It’s “MTV who?”
It’s easy to forget how revolutionary the concept of MTV was back in the day. Music videos weren’t really a thing. At least, ones that were much more than just filming the artists performing weren’t. Once the concept was understood and the money started rolling in (as it inevitably does) the music video could make or break the artist.
That last bit is much the same, but mercifully nowadays we don’t need to worry about having to wait to wait for hours of music videos we don’t want to see for the chance of a video we do. It makes random discovery a bit more unusual and brings back a somewhat more benign version of payola than the ones that motivated the charts back in the 80s but there we are. About the only thing that is still mostly available to us on a quasi-random basis is advertisements. Which brings me neatly to the Superbowl.
As of writing this, I have no idea who won the Superbowl. In fact, I don’t even know who is it that took part in the Super Bowl. What I do know is that there has been a long and started tradition of people saying that they don’t watch the Super Bowl, but they instead watch things that are tangentially related to it.
There’s the marketing majors that only watch the event for the ads, the people who watch the halftime because they adore the artist, the ones that watch the halftime because they hate the artist, and the ones that don’t watch it but make sure that they know just enough to be smug about not watching it come Monday (if you have to fit this article into a category, this is the one).
Then there’s the Puppy Bowl and the kitty bowl and watch parties where you watch something else. All of it based on the fact that “nobody watches the superbowl for the game”.
I’m not immune to it, thanks to that same thing that made MTV irrelevant, I got to enjoy prince singing purple rain underneath exactly that. As well as remind myself of the sad decline of the Black-eyed Peas. And as far as commercials are concerned, Apple’s 1984 is hard to beat for iconic. And the 2018 Doritos/Mountain Dew ads live rent-free in my head. But you will note that these are supposed to be window dressing for the game. The superbowl ad being elaborate was a product of the hordes of football fans watching the game and the exorbitant fees that they could charge as a result.
This is not the exception this year, where 113 million people tuned in, with an additional five million or so dropping by just in time to see Rhianna.
Certainly a better audience than MTV has had in a long time
