What's the "M" Stand For, Again?

Sometime over the last few weeks, the channel MTV has dropped a phrase that's been on its logo from the beginning, "Music Television."

As anyone who's watched the channel for longer than fifteen minutes recently could tell you, there really hasn't been any dadgum music on the thing since we were crank-starting Model A's and paying our cable bills with Continentals. The end began back in the late 80s, when MTV noticed that people often thought highly of their local PBS stations because they broadcast funny, quirky British sitcoms. MTV programmers managed to find a British sitcom that was the exact opposite of those, and inflicted The Young Ones on their audience. Other stuff joined it.

Eventually, we had a channel filled with so-called "reality" shows in which mostly shallow people acted about as naturally as you might expect shallow people to act when there's a camera filming them and deceiving them into believing other people will find them as fascinating as they find themselves. In the meantime, MTV had spawned MTV2, VH-1 and VH-1 Classic (the company MTV Networks owns several channels, including Comedy Central and Spike TV).

This sort of "logo reduction" isn't uncommon. There's no entertainment programming on what was originally the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, so it's long been just plain ol' ESPN. You rarely see the word "Nike" on any of that company's merchandise anymore, just the swoosh logo by itself. Many McDonald's restaurants only display the Golden Arches and the name itself is absent. MTV's change best represents the kind of programming the channel airs today, for worse or not-quite-as-worse-but-still-pretty-awful.

As the Buggles told us in the first video MTV aired, "Video Killed the Radio Star." Now, not quite 30 years later, we find the video star dead as well; only this time it seems it's by his own hand.