How Fark Ruined the Afternoon of June 11, 2005
The premise: spam an MTV voting form for TRL top 10 to get Devo’s “Whip It” on the charts. This scheme was set into motion by Something Awful, a popular satire site, and made its way to Fark.com, a site I frequent that lampoons mainstream media by collecting stories of interest and giving them funny headlines. When I read that Fark was promoting this spam, I was enthusiastic and voted, thinking in some small way that we might be able to reclaim MTV for the generation that was around when they played music.
Why Devo - Whip It is a great music video (damogran):
This video, fraught with the emotional ambiguity of teen sexual angst, is a paradigm of socio-economic discontentment experienced by the generation that created it. All the elements of the medium (to include the fast-paced switching between scene elements, background characters and a sound-stage of primal Star Trek quality) contribute to the end effect desired by not only the director but also the artists. This uncommon synergy just isn’t seen anymore in the modern pop and rock videos, and it’s likely never to emerge again.
The problem was, the only way to tell if the scheme had been successful was to watch TRL. Looking back on it, I can’t understand what everybody thought was going to happen. Did anyone really think that MTV was really going to displace any of its paid-for top 10 on Total Request Live to show Devo? In holding out some small glimpse of hope, I dedicated myself to watching TRL from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. - what turned out to be perhaps the worst hour of my life.
TRL does not even show the full music video, only about the first 20 seconds. Note that if they played all 10 music videos IN FULL, the show would last 35 minutes. There are some commercials - I would estimate 15 minutes of commercials for every 15 minutes of show. The rest of it is spent doing stupid stuff that makes no sense - I still to this day, two years later, remember - for its sheer inaneness - the part of the show where they chose a girl out of the studio audience and had her dump her purse on the counter for a guy to rummage through. That was it, the entire premise.
Devo did not make the top 10, on June 11, 2005, this stuff did (I don’t actually remember this or know who most of these ‘artists’ are, but if you do, I’m sure you can understand the intense agony I felt while braving this show):
#10 Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Green Day
#9 Ludicris, Get Back
#8 Some Usher song
#7 Some Jennifer Lopez song
#6 Some Jesse McCartney song. Famous quote: “I don’t waste my time with unattractive girls…just the hot ones.”
#5 Mario
#4 Kelly Clarkson
#3 Destinys Child
#2 Ashanti
#1 Eminem
At least I knew when to quit. Some people ventured on under the premise that the flood of votes from the 11th would count toward the next day. Wrong. #1 for the 12th: Lil Wayne. Who are these people, and how do they manage to make money off this garbage?
I can’t believe that I just watched this show for an entire hour.
I want that hour of my life back
The unholy abomination that is TRL was rumored to be getting cancelled in 2007, but in fact, MTV is going to retool it and change the name to YouRL - just so you’ll be on notice never to EVER consider watching this - or any other show on MTV for that matter. (Rob & Big?)
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I remember the infamous day well. The fact that I was expecting to see Devo, and didn’t, really skewed my view of a wholesome commercial market. This really made me rethink my carreer in film and television. I don’t even like Rob and Big. Parents need to say to their children, “this is going to make you stupid, and I’m stupid for putting a TV in your bedroom. Go do your homework.” Then maybe shows based around “showing you advertising and making you stupid”, won’t succeed. Maybe one day, when I’m much older, I’ll be able to place a show on MTV which is made of 200 seconds of music, and the rest comprised of scientific fact…like how the Moon revolves around the Earth…oh, and then MTV goes off the air for exactly one hour of daytime in which kids will be expected to go do their homework. And then they can submit their work to their local MTV homework squad, and then that squad will reconnect the power…is this too communist-like for anyone? Hopefully that will never come to pass, so…PARENTS DO YOUR JOB, MTV IS SUCKING THE LIFE OUT OF THEM AND MAKING THEM SLOW IN THE HEAD, and complete jerks, ie socially inept jerks. But hey, if there are enough socially inept jerky people in the world then they’ll have someone to communicate with.