| The bottom line is that we were light years ahead of everyone else. | |  |  | | This just in: MTV News' Tabitha Soren and Kurt Loder at the Video Music Awards, Los Angeles, Sept 5, 1991. | | (Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | | | quote of the day | | | rantnrave:// | Choose/Lose/News
Pouring one out today for KURT LODER, TABITHA SOREN, JOHN NORRIS, SERENA ALTSCHUL, SWAY CALLOWAY, SUCHIN PAK, ALISON STEWART, TIM SOMMER, CHRIS CONNELLY and everyone else who stood in front of or behind the cameras or in cubicles at 1515 Broadway or any such place reporting, writing, booking, producing or otherwise creating the pop-culture information monster that was MTV NEWS, which came to a quiet and not completely surprising end Tuesday as a result of company-wide layoffs across PARAMOUNT, SHOWTIME and MTV. All you WALTER CRONKITEs and MARGARET HOOVERs of MTV, you will be missed.
MTV News, like MTV itself, had any number of functions and forms during its 40-ish year run. In the beginning, in the early 1980s, it was a ragtag group of music journalists (working under the direction of future network bigwig DOUG HERZOG) gathering blurb-worthy bits from publicists to feed to the channel's VJs to read in between music videos. They'd sneak in additional bits, whenever they could, about artists the channel otherwise would have no reason to mention (FELA! SUN RA! BAD BRAINS! "And now, here's COREY HART's new video..."). Sometimes, they'd be the first mention anywhere on the channel of fledgling future stars.
For a short while toward the end, in the mid-2010s, MTV News was a well curated group of music journalists and cultural critics producing a serious online magazine (under the direction of the great JESSICA HOPPER) that the channel's on-air personalities and reality stars may or may not have known existed. (It was also, at the exact same moment, another team of writers gathering bits from publicists and influencers to help drive internet traffic and TV viewership. This news led and that news followed. Both mattered, just differently.)
In between, there were Kurt and Tabitha and THE WEEK IN ROCK and CHOOSE OR LOSE and KURT CUBAIN's death and MADONNA and BRITNEY and COURTNEY LOVE and TUPAC and BARACK OBAMA and the FREE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS WEARER of "usually briefs" and interstitial news snacks and longform news dinners and a new (and important, I believe) understanding of how promoting pop and questioning pop could co-exist, and how, as the network's field of vision got wider, pop culture and serious news and politics could and should interact, and how each could influence the other, and how each could creep, for better and for worse, into the other's territory, and how give could become take and take could become give.
For a brief moment at the turn of the millennium, there was also me. I was technically in MTV News' employ for only a year or so, but I was in the building for much longer than that, never all that far from the news floor. The brand and its conflicting inputs and ideas are burned into me like an invisible tattoo and they deeply inform MusicREDEF, whose roots lead directly back to that building and that era. I met JASON HIRSCHHORN, who started this enterprise, at SONICNET, which MTV bought and folded into MTV News, and those connections cast slivers of light and shadow over every discussion we've had about what we do and how we do it.
And so I'm thinking today about the stars of MTV News I watched on TV long before I got there, and the MTV Newsies I worked side by side with, the ones who are still part of my life, the ones who've drifted away, the ones who watched the towers fall through our windows at 770 Broadway, the ones who contributed to all the great and mediocre work we all did, the ones who taught me more than I appreciated at the time, the ones who I hopefully taught at least a little. And pouring out one more for the souls who were laid off Tuesday, the last of a good and noble breed.
Etc Etc Etc
The majority acquisition of TIDAL by JACK DORSEY's company BLOCK was "by all accounts, a terrible business decision," but Block's board was free to make that terrible decision, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, throwing out a shareholder lawsuit against Dorsey and Block's board of directors for said terrible decision... IMAGINE DRAGONS' DAN REYNOLDS and DANIEL WAYNE SERMON performed a short set for striking Hollywood writers outside NETFLIX's Los Angeles HQ Tuesday afternoon... New NATO member Finland and possible future NATO member Sweden are among the first 10 countries to advance to the finals of EUROVISION. Twenty-six countries in all, including last year's winner, Ukraine, and the five European financial powers who get automatic bids, will compete in Saturday's grand final... Speaking of MTV News, congrats to my old colleague JEM ASWAD, who's been promoted to executive editor, music at VARIETY, replacing another old friend, SHIRLEY HALPERIN, who's leaving to become editor in chief of LOS ANGELES magazine.
Rest in Peace
Brazilian rock superstar RITA LEE, co-founder, singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist for late '60s psychedelic visionaries Os Mutantes and a major star on her own for decades after she left the group in the early '70s. Defiant and provocative from the start, she and her Mutantes bandmates, who were key figures in the Tropicália movement, snuck political messages into thrilling rock songs designed to be "complicated so that nobody understands it." Lee continued tweaking authority to the very end, naming the tumor that ultimately killed her after far-right Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. Current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has called for three days of public mourning for "one of the biggest and most brilliant names in Brazilian music"... Southern California punk rocker turned journalist JOHN ALBERT, who was an early member of both Christian Death and Bad Religion and whose subjects as a writer for LA Weekly, Slake and other outlets included music, baseball and addiction... Graphic artist FRANK KOZIK, who designed posters for bands including Nirvana, Pearl Jam and the Beastie Boys and album covers for the Offspring, Queens of the Stone Age and others... ERIC SHOUTIN' SHERIDAN, singer for Washington, D.C., jump blues revivalists the Uptown Rhythm Kings.
| | - Matty Karas, curator | |
| |  | | Rock And Roll Globe |
| | RETRO READ: Remembering the Glory Days of MTV News | | By Tim Sommer | | Those of us at MTV News in the 1980s thought of ourselves as the conscience of the network. We really did. We were the annoying over-chatty boyfriends of the nation, insisting on telling you about B-sides and Syd Barrett solo albums when all you wanted to do was enjoy your dinner. | | | | | |  | | The New York Observer |
| | Frank Ocean, Coachella and Beautiful Chaos: Is Live Music Dead? | | By Jameson Draper | | Catching a show was once an easy path to cultural discovery and a chance to revel in the unexpected. But as access to music archives grows, live shows have become not only predictably perfect but also increasingly inaccessible. | | | | | | |  | | Million Dollaz Worth of Game |
| | Million Dollaz Worth of Game: LL Cool J | | By Gillie Da King, Wallo267 and LL Cool J | | This guest needs no introduction. Tap in to this episode for gems from LL Cool J about creativity, innovation, leadership, and success. | | | |  | | Don't Rock the Inbox |
| | Taylor Swift Is Folk Music | | By Marissa R. Moss and Natalie Weiner | | The Eras Tour, folk music and where we actually find country music's "family." | | | | |  | | Music Ally |
| | Reclaiming Fame: as an artist, who's your customer? | | By Piers Henwood | | Piers Henwood, artist manager and musician, writes about the pressure on artists to succeed in a needy industry and an always-on culture - and he also picks apart our own expectations, as fans. | | | |  | | *IN SYNC |
| | *IN SYNC: The Last Of Us / Long Long Time | | By Rachel Brodsky and Aviv Rubinstien | | The third episode of HBO's "The Last Of Us" brings the emotional story of Frank and Bill, punctuated by the melody from Linda Ronstadt's 1970s track "Long Long Time." In this episode, Rachel and Aviv take a deeper look into the song, the episode, and how the track made its way into the episode. | | | | | |  | | Freaky Trigger |
| | Pop As Ghost | | By Tom Ewing | | A review of "Abba Voyage." There is something wonderfully Abba-ish about the fact that this very 21st century concert may center on what is basically a colossal piece of tinfoil. | | | | what we're into | | | Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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