I have been driven to write this post by Dooce's most recent post. For those new to the blogosphere, Dooce has one of the most popular (and best) blogs out there. Well, her latest post was about the MTV Video Music Awards and she might as well have plucked mine and my wife's thoughts from our heads with some tongs and slapped them down on her blog. Thank all that is holy that I have a Tivo or I would have gnawed my own head off. And before you ask why watch it at all, talk to my wife. Much like a highway rubbernecker, she wanted to see the gruesome nightmare for herself. So I wanted to echo Dooce's comments and add a point of my own about the sewage system that is MTV which she left out and which scares the crap out of me. And perhaps her too, since she too has offspring - perhaps she'll grace me with a comment?
So, what is it that scares the crap out of me? What if my kids grow up to be MTV kids? What if they dress like that, talk like that, find crap like that entertaining? What if they find Jackass the height of culture? What if they want to "pimp their rides" - what the fuck is that anyway? What if they find it cool to refer to their female friends as "hos" and "bitches" and "skanks"? What if they consider the ghastly noise I heard on stage to even be "music". And like Dooce, I'm no old fart who talks about kids and their new-fangled things. I'm 35 with a large, constantly updated music collection ranging from The Beatles to Abba to Green Day to Mozart to Dave Brubeck to Scott Joplin to Coldplay. At any given time my kids could be listening to The Girl from Ipanema or Dancing Queen or American Idiot - they certainly have the opportunity to have very eclectic tastes. So it's not just me being tragically unhip. But will they be lured to the dark side regardless? Either by the magical techniques of hypnosis or subliminal advertising which MTV undoubtedly uses to get viewers, or more likely just because their peers watch it and so they will feel that they have to in order to fit in. I would be distraught if my little boys grew up to be that kind of vacuous, offensive dope. And I fear that if it's going to happen there is little I can do about it. Even if I bury our TV under the pool, they will try it at their friends' houses as surely as they will masturbate. I suppose my only hope is that in these early years I can make them so classy and culturally savvy that they will snub their noses at it of their own volition. Either that, or maybe I can get hundreds of hours of 80's MTV on video and keep playing it on a loop for 14 years until they leave for college - perhaps they'll never know that Toto are not a new group.
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Posted by: Mariam | January 19, 2010 at 03:09 AM