Music is being pushed to the margins of the television schedules. It's the background to US teen dramas, provides middle-aged entertainment on Parky and sells trainers to pumped-up consumers. With overhyped, homemade, prankster videos all over the net, Brian Boydlaments the lack of dedicated music TV shows
WHERE were you on July 6th, 1972 at about 7.30pm? In all probability the only people who can answer this question are rock stars - albeit of the faded variety. On the evening of 6/7/72, arguably the most important music event on television took place when an alien with fluorescent hair, dressed in a body-hugging jumpsuit and wearing a bucket full of make-up, sang about "hazy cosmic jives".
For many rock stars of the 1980s and 1990s, David Bowie's performance of Starman on Top of the Pops remains their single most influential moment. Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen remembers the moment well, saying he was hooked on Starman the first time he saw Bowie sing it. "I seem to remember me being the first to say it and then there was a host of other rock stars saying how that Top of the Pops performance changed their lives."
Top of the Pops also gave us The Sex Pistols sneering for (and at) Britain, and Kurt Cobain singing "Load up on drugs and kill your friends" before the watershed. But in the sheer incongruity stakes, there's no beating Jim Hendrix's appearance on the Lulu TV show in the 1960s or, more recently, Radiohead performing their wan anthem Creep at an MTV beach party in front of a bunch of perplexed bikini-clad babes.
These moments are gone and will never be repeated. Somehow, "Did you see Jamie Callum on the Parkinson show?" doesn't have the same ring. Music television, with its moments of inspired genius/lunacy, is effectively dead. It's been shunted off into a latenight niche slot, and in disgust it has slung its Stratocaster over its shoulder and headed off to the welcome embrace of on-line video.
There are no music programmes left as such because music is now everywhere on the television, from advertisements to sports shows. If you want to see and hear the bleeding edge of indie, you're better off with the chat shows. The old idea that people would sit through St Winifred's School Choir and Demis Roussos to get to David Bowie is redundant.
Music has been co-opted by the light entertainment shows, and the only regular terrestrial dedicated music shows that remain are BBC's Later (which is sort of a Top of the Pops for grown-ups anyway) and Channel 4's new Abbey Road, which features live sets from three bands each week. RTÉ's music programming appears to be confined to Other Voices, which only runs for a few weeks at this time of year, Dave Fanning's Last Broadcast and other occasional features. However, newcomer Channel 6 has a late-night music video show every night.
The supreme irony here is that MTV, which is credited with revolutionising music television when it first started, now hardly shows any music videos and really should consider changing its name. Just as internet usage began to increase, MTV saw the scribbling on the wall and started replacing its music programmes with reality TV shows. The station scored an early success with The Real World and was fully converted to the reality genre with the global success of The Osbournes. The circle was squared, if you like, when Kelly Osbourne got herself a record company deal thanks to her appearance on a non-music MTV show. There is still plenty of music on MTV, but not on the main channel. You have to tune in to affiliate stations MTV2, MTV Hits or MTV Jams to find it.
MTV knew that the internet, with its choice and flexibility and user-driven power, would destroy music television, but even it could not have predicted how the user-generated site YouTube would become the most important music promotional tool around. From that perspective you could say that a not very well known band from Chicago called OK Go were instrumental in finishing off music television shows. But the damage had been done long before they arrived on the scene.
OK Go are not a particularly good band, but the videos to their songs have been watched by millions. The video for their A Million Ways single has been viewed over nine million times on YouTube in the space of one year - the most downloaded music video ever. The video to their follow-up single Here It Goes Again (which shows the band members dancing on treadmills) was downloaded a staggering 1.5 million times on its first day of release. Rather oddly, MTV - the music station that doesn't play any music - awarded OK Go an MTV Video Award for their efforts.
To copper-fasten its grip on the music market, YouTube announced (shortly after being bought out by Google) that it soon hopes to host every music video ever created while still remaining free of charge. YouTube has successfully negotiated the tricky copyright difficulties it once had with the major and independent labels and is now a vital platform in music promotion.
Free of charge or not, is all this a good thing for music? One generation had the visceral epiphany of seeing an an alien with fluorescent hair singing about hazy cosmic jives. It was all we talked about for six months afterwards. This generation has a not very good band with a "wacky" video in which they dance on treadmills. It's enough to make you nostalgic for Dave Lee Travis.
