Culture

The Decade in VH1

Mike Gormly

"We spent so much time judging what other people created that we've created very, very little of our own."

- Chuck Palahniuk, Choke, 2001

I remember walking past a news stand in 1999 and seeing an article about how the coming decade didn't lend itself to a convenient contraction like the 70s, 80s or 90s. The article made several suggestions, including the Aughts and the Naughties, and I was left wondering what name would eventually be chosen. Ten years later, we're still trying to decide what to call this decade. As we bid goodbye to the 2000s, it seems wholly appropriate that this amorphous decade of ours remains nameless.

A lot of the blame for this can probably heaped upon the wide-scale move away from collective entertainment toward individually programmed leisure preferences. In the decade of iPods, Tivo and Netflix, music, movies, and television ceased no longer offered us a unified social identity. We had to turn elsewhere for our common cultural experiences. In effect, the MTV Generation gave way to the VH1 Generation.

Like the rest of you, I watched far more VH1 than MTV this decade. I have no idea what MTV was airing in the last decade aside from The Osbournes and "not music videos." Similarly, VH1 moved away from showing actual music in the 2000s, even going so far as to drop its "Music First" slogan in 2003. Late 90s music-themed hit shows like Pop-Up Video and Behind the Music provided the first glimpse of a post-music video future for VH1.

By the middle of the 2000s, programs like The 50 Sexiest Video Moments, The 100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders, "Celebreality" shows that applied The Bachelor's date show format to has-been stars like Bret Michaels and Flavor Flav, and, most importantly, the I Love The... shows dominated the network.

Once VH1 caught a whiff of success, it drove this new model into the ground. In 2002, the network debuted I Love The 80s, a remake of a British Program which featured their C-List Celebrities making snarky comments about Huey Lewis and John Hughes movies. The formula proved so successful that they not only produced two sequels (I Love The 80s Strikes Back) and (I Love The 80s in 3-D), but also dedicated two I Love The series to both the 90s and 70s. VH1 branched out further, creating non-year specific programs like I Love The Holidays and I Love Toys. The network couldn't even wait for the 2000s to end, delivering I Love The New Millennium in 2008.

Whether VH1 created this phenomenon of permanent nostalgia or was merely the most successful at responding to the public's wishes is open to discussion, but the fact remains that the 2000s were a decade in which more people focused on identifying with other decades than living in the one that was actually transpiring. All of us at one point or another ran into someone wishing aloud how much better their lives would be if they had been in The 60s or The 70s rather than today. We all attended our share of 80s parties because playing Ciara or Beyonce elicited far more groans than Madonna or Duran Duran. In between jello shots, we fancied that we maintained a superficial superiority over all of those 80's Neanderthals in "Choose Life" shirts and day-glo spandex. But in the end, the joke was on us, and Michael Ian Black.

After a decade of alternately mocking and mythologizing the past with an air of irreverent detachment, Generation Y has painted itself into the corner that Generation X found itself in a few years ago. Having spent so much time deconstructing the ideas of the past, we've found ourselves at a loss for how form new ideas. This phenomenon was visible across the cultural spectrum, from movie theaters being deluged with sequels, remakes and tv show adaptations to the music industry offering up imitations of CBGBs bands, British Garage Rock, and New Wave as the latest trends.

As the Decade comes to an end, VH1's programming is choked with sequels of spin-offs of rip-offs like Brooke Knows Best 2 (as in, Hulk Hogan's daughter) and I Want to Work For Diddy 2 (as in, Puff Daddy). I'm confident they'll keep wringing this washcloth till they get a new idea. This became abundantly clear when VH1 announced a revival of Behind The Music, bringing the network back to the same dead end they encountered at the beginning of the decade. How much time the revival will buy them is uncertain, considering how the resurrection was greeted by the same shrugging bemusement that MTV encounter when they brought Headbanger's Ball to cover the Nu-Metal fad. I wonder who the new show is even going to cover. Did this decade produce enough rock stars to even fill a season on the show? The fact that their first three episodes are focusing on Lil Wayne, T.I., and Pink suggests not.

It's possible that MTV and VH1 are being faced with the prospect of Newspaper-like obsolescence. As consumer imperatives become more focused on crafting personalized bubbles of media, fewer people care what Viacom Executives think is cool. And with Pop Culture growing harder and harder to define, it's also harder to determine who the true authorities on it are. In the long run, that may be enough to keep things interesting. At the very least, it should be more interesting than what Hal Sparks thinks about Top Gun.