“Killing In The Name” by Rage Against the Machine is kickass and badass to the max. I saw a video for this song on MTV at a friends house when it was released in 1993 and it exploded my little head. It still bangs. Rage Against the Machine produced, to quote wikipedia, “fiercely polemical music, which brewed sloganeering leftist rants against corporate America, cultural imperialism, and government oppression into a Molotov cocktail of punk, hip hop, and thrash.”
That is funny because this Rage counterculture snippet was pushed me by a corporate music channel, MTV/Vicacom, that was programming for the “least common denominator”, in the profit-maximization broadcast sense not the moralizing sense. If I were a teen today, I could delve much deeper into politically subversive stuff on my own with Google, and for the same reason I think fiduciary responsibility has forced mainstream corporate-controlled content organizations to become even more mainstream. The internet is a pervasive long tail medium that has forced fat head mediums to become more fat head. Current.tv tried to flip the script by creating the cross-platform NPR for my generation, but…..Al Gore? The subversive stuff on today’s MTV is Drake talking about self-esteem issues, which to be fair is subversive in today’s mainstream, but it doesn’t have the charge of a dude who is trembling in the face of the evil that is oppression.
To carry this further, MTV was originally the dark horse of cable content (“Tell your cable company ‘I want my MTV!’”), but with The Real World they established the new “user-generated” content model reality TV, whose economics have totally reshaped television. Per Wikipedia MTV was truly mainstream, referenced on SNL in 1993, 12 years before YouTube was founded when modems peaked out at 1.4 KB/s. Shouts to Bob Pittman, founder of MTV.
