I am showing my age when Isay this, but remember when MTV was SO COOL? It was so unbelievably cool, it was impossible to stop watching it.

And ‘they’ came to say that the MTV generation had short attention spans. Anyone who had cable watched MTV for hours. Music Videos were so exciting!

I guess MTV believed what ‘they’ had to say, because they stopped even playing the whole video and brought on pre-school-teacher-style hosts and interviewer:

“Maroon 5 is sooooo aMAZing in this video that we just played 20 seconds of…Don’t you think so?” (everyone screams) “That’s right! And let me introduce you to this other artist-of-the-moment who is standing with me. Say hi!” “hi” “SHE’LL be with us all afternoon as we show more pieces of videos for you all. Doesn’t that sound like FUN?” (everyone screams)

Stop. Just stop. It’s like a genius got alzhiemer’s.

And it’s not like VH1 is any better, with it’s head sewn on backwards for the permanent retro-nostalgia. How many “100 greatest” anything shows do we really need? Let it go, people.

It’s about the music, or did you forget?

Let’s just say, Thank GOD for the internet. And here’s what set me off:

Live 8 concerts were made for the internet

“Television seemed shockingly old-fashioned during Saturday’s worldwide concert for poverty relief. AOL’s coverage was so superior, it may one day serve as a historical marker in drawing people to computers instead of TV screens for big events.

Part of it was simply the way things were structured. Concerts held more or less simultaneously in 10 venues are next to impossible for television to get its arms around. Live Aid 20 years ago, with concerts only in London and Philadelphia, was much easier.

And part of it was also MTV’s failure to really try. There were as many commercial breaks as performances, and MTV’s stable of correspondents spent more time talking about what a fantastic event it was instead of showing it.

With a click of the mouse AOL visitors could jump from a video feed of the London concert to one from Philadelphia, Berlin or Rome. The performances were shown in their entirety. AOL programming chief Bill Wilson claimed that 160,000 people were simultaneously viewing the video streams at any given time, and that more than 5 million people sampled the video at some point during the day.”