I Want My MTV To Actually Play Live 8

Posted by ad on Jul 11, 2005 in Music | 0 comments

This post originally appeared on Screen*Play.

Last Saturday I boarded a train to Bronxville for a bbq with friends and to watch Live 8 on MTV. While stuffing myself silly with food as though it were my very last meal, I camped out in the A/C to watch the show. To say this concert was anything less than historic would mean you must work for MTV Networks as that’s how they treated it during the July 2nd  broadcast and again this weekend during the re-broadcast.

MTV’s job during Live 8 was very simple.  The VJs were there to introduce who was playing on stage and the cameras to film/show the performance the VJ just introduced.  The only deviation would be for a VJ to segue the viewer to another location where the process previously outlined would be repeated.  That’s it.

Instead, too much on-air time was given to the VJs – music in the background, watching a 20-something host make jokes to the crowd a half a mile from the stage.  The worst offender is MTV UK’s Jo Good who cut into Pink Floyd’s last song, “Comfortably Numb,” to let us know we were watching Live 8 on MTV.  I’m sure I saw the thinkMTV commercial 100 times that day as well.

To save face after all the bad publicity, VH1 and MTV decided to re-broadcast the concerts commercial free this past weekend. Note that I didn’t say VJ free.  Beginning
Saturday at 10am, VH1 would air 5 hours, followed by another 5 on MTV at 3.  Well, not according to my digital cable guide or TIVO.  MTV and VH1 never bothered to update their schedules, so viewers looking for the re-broadcasts would never have found them.  Instead the schedule included The Real World, Room Raiders
and I Love the 80’s blocks with an episode of Punk’d and Strip Search mixed in.

In the end, I’ve seen most of the performances on AOL Music, a web portal anyone can access for free. Within minutes, I found what I wanted to see and I was watching a better recording of Live 8 than anything I saw on MTV.

I wonder if kids even know that the M in MTV used to actually stand for something called music.