Music Channels! What Rocks and What Smells Like Wet Socks.

When you hear the term "music channel", what comes into your mind? Since music is mostly about the artistic composition of sounds, What would Television (a visual medium) show? Well, for one thing, music has never been just sounds. It has always been a voice of the soul that provokes emotion and imagination. Even before music videos, the theater has always been accompanied by music for representing the emotional states of the story on stage. Even silent films were assisted by some piano player to express the chipper spirit of Charlie Chaplin. So, it's not a stretch of the imagination that television would one day have channels dedicated for the wonders of music.

Unfortunately, like termites eating a wooden house, music has slowly been losing it's meaning and purpose by talentless wannabes, money grabbing posers, and hacks with no real creativity. But I digress. I'll talk about that later on another post.

Here, we're going to compare two music channels. One was a great underdog that slowly vanished off television, the other (which is still on television) is now a greasy, slimy bowl of elephant piss.


Good: The Box


This was the channel that introduced me to R&B and some smooth artists like Brian Mcnight, Musiq Soulchild, Usher and The Black Eyed Peas (before they added furgie). Yes. I was very young when I learned about R&B. While I was a kid living with a lot of siblings, there wasn't enough money to pay enough channels. Which was why the channel for the Box was fuzzy. But never the less, I ignored the fuzzyness and just enjoyed how it managed itself from the music, to how they displayed the artistic looking menus of the songs that people chosen to play next. The best thing about this were three reasons.

First, was the era it was brought up in. Early 90's baby!
Second, It kept not just the popular songs, but many songs including other genres sometimes.
Third, was that it let all of the people get a chance to choose their music videos.

Unfortunately, As I grew up when T.V screens became better and better (to eliminate fuzzy channels), This channel completely vanished. I guess that is the risk you get for being a real underdog. Thankfully, as long as you have Comcast, you can have multiple music channels that have either one or two genres.

Awful: MTV


Most of the time (during the early days), It has shown few music videos and that's all I knew about MTV. Now it has just about anything but music. The shows now broadcast by this troublesome channel values trashy reality shows that includes giving 16 (or so) crazy, idiotic, sex crazed people a huge luxurious place of their own and alcohol in exchange to watch them act like neanderthals on T.V. From Real World, Jersey Shore, Jack Ass, to lots of other shows that I've read in a magazine called "who gives a crap". The most inconsistent part of the company that runs this dump can show alcohol use and sex galore. But it forbids any use of Marijuana.... Where as in the REAL world, plenty of friends I know have connections to get some herb.

That's all I have to report about channels for now.