Like an oracle in the night, Moby speaks to us; whether we care is a different story. While he does deserve credit for somehow reviving the Michael Stipe gimmick, Moby's still got a lot of work to do before I start taking life advice from another skinny, sickly, bald, white man. However, Moby's new song "We Are All Made of Stars" has the potential to be a summer smash through, if nothing else, in the wonderful world of clip shows and dedications. The video is already celebrity-packed with appearances from J.C., Dave Navaro and Ron Jeremy, and the tune requires no more effort to sing along than the numbing moan of a lifelong death. Even if you don't like the song, you'll find it hard this summer not to hum the slow refrain, "People they come together /people they fall apart," as everyone around you commends Moby's new efforts to save the jackolope. Let's just give Moby a bubble to live in and be done with it, shall we?
?_? If you'd like a message that is a little less vegan, a little less soft, the Lost Prophets have hit MTV with a much more appropriate vision for our generation with their new album The Fake Sound of Progress. These 20-somethings are helping to nail down the ultimate sound of hybrid rock and are stepping forth to promote the lost Gen-Xers, an unrealized group meant to save the world that I propagated in the last installment of Bit Theory. These young, British "quasi-future kids" grew up during the fake technology of the '80s just as we did, played the same "Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja" and "Shinobi" side-scrolling 2-D platform Sega games as we did and are understandably as leery as we are about entering a new age. As we now understand the limits of being educated under the constraints of a presupposed technological revolution, of being born as computer guinea pigs, we are responsible for making sure the next tech boom is for real. We are the super-intelligent, non-corporate clones born in the late '70s/early '80s who were raised on DOS, programmed in BASIC and linked our 2400 bps modems through BBSs to build the Internet. We hacked your computers before we got bored enough to build you the security software. We took notes during Back to the Future 2. We know how all this turns out in the end, we've heard the fake sound of progress- but nobody cares. We are the "Lost Prophets."
?_? To put a storied end to my last edition of Bit Theory for the News-Letter, I thought it would be a good idea to speak for a moment on the possibility for a full-circle evolution of MTV. The classic anti-MTV argument that criticized their overplay of rap and boy band pop has the potential to be eased with the launch of four new digital channels from MTV Networks. MTV Hits will finally provide a space to hype Britney all day long and the long-running and broadly-defined MTV Jams will finally have its own channel (Nicktoons TV and VH1 Mega Hits round out the new additions). If MTV plays this right, they've got a chance to argue that the mother MTV station is now freed up to feature exclusively cutting-edge music. That could mean that all types of music from every type of underground could have a better chance of being heard. But hey, let's call a spade a spade- it's still MTV. It crushed the spirit of talent, extended the celebrity of rock and killed the radio star. It cultivated a generation of Gap clones and spread the evils of popdom. When it realized it had created a new genre called "reality TV," it didn't let you forget, rerunning Real World day after day after day. But it also gave us Liquid Television and The State. It gave us a few years of Whitesnake, Poison, Cinderella, RATT and the much beloved Headbangers' Ball. And it figured out the language of a youth demographic that advertisers often find hard to reach.
Matthew Gilbert, in his article "Happy Birthday MTV," explained the multilayered programming: "There is the video for a song on a soundtrack for a movie; there is the show about the making of the video of the song on the soundtrack of the movie; there is the show about the making of the movie; and so forth, each one selling the single, the soundtrack, the artist, the movie and MTV itself." Love it or hate it, it works- and it's powerful. It's "Rock the Vote" campaign put Bill Clinton into office, it introduced us to words like "buzzworthy" and "Beavis," and now it single-handedly decides the fate of Lance Bass. It's done a lot, that MTV, and in the end, we can only hope that it should be able to figure out music too.
?_? It's been fun. Keep on keepin' on.
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