Inside MTV

Duff, the gorgeous MTV VJ, is in her room at the Daytona Beach Marriott, hanging out with her equally gorgeous new friend, Whitfield Crane, lead singer from Ugly Kid Joe. She's fresh from a string of photo shoots for fashion magazines. His first record is zooming up the charts. They're in Florida for MTV's coverage of Daytona's Spring Break festivities, he to perform, she to host. A little celebration seems in order.

Duff, 30, calls room service and orders champagne and a giant batch of pancakes--50, at least. No butter, no syrup, just pancakes. The waiter rolls in this humongous cart. The scene is like a Three Stooges movie. Duff and Crane open the window and look down to the hotel's sprawling patio, the beach and the MTV stage beyond. The VJ and the rock star sail pancakes one by one out onto the teeming masses of horny college students far below.

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Poor Duff doesn't realize it, but rock-and-roll excess has become politically incorrect at MTV. The channel is in the process of redefining itself for the Nineties, and a downshift to humility, and relevancy, is in progress.

MTV recently completed a major research study that revealed, as have other studies, a deep-seated malaise among young people between 14 and 24 years old. "The baby-bust generation is not held in very high regard by the baby boom--controlled media," says MTV Networks chairman Tom Freston. "People think they watch too much MTV, they don't read, they don't write, they don't give a shit. It's very far from the truth." He's asked if it isn't true that 18-to-24-year-olds have the lowest voter turnout of any age group. "Yeah, well, nobody's talking to them," Freston quickly answers. "And they're inheriting a world that is, by and large, fucked. They can't have a lot of sex, they can't drink and drive, the environment's totally fucked up, everybody's getting cancer. The economy sucks. There's a lot of despair out there."

This discovery that America's youth is on a serious downer happened to come at a time when MTV found itself in a bit of a funk. Judy McGrath is MTV's creative director, a job that makes her, as a corporate bio puts it, "essentially the creative guardian of MTV's image." She's fulfilled that responsibility over the past seven years with considerable wit, intelligence and taste. The fact that MTV's channel IDs, promos and "art breaks" are usually far more interesting than its music videos attests to that. A 40-year-old woman who manages to be funky and elegant at the same time (her office furniture includes hand-made maple chairs by Dialogica and a ceramic table lamp in the shape of Michael Jackson's head), McGrath recalls that sometime in 1991 an uneasy notion set in that MTV had gone awry.

"We were all saying, 'How come we don't like the IDs anymore?' and 'How come I'm tired of the promos?' " Pondering the situation with MTV's marketing consultant Fred Seibert, it was decided that the problem was a sort of groundlessness that had allowed MTV to drift into inner space. "I think we were starting to get into art for art's sake," McGrath says. "In the Eighties we were definitely into totally produced, totally slick, total wizardry. We were almost to the point of being for our own entertainment instead of for the audience's. It lacked some sense of purpose."

Searching for a reason for MTV's being, McGrath and Seibert came back to the despair identified in the research. They realized that they were dealing with nothing less than a disenfranchised generation. No one, including MTV, was taking a stand for today's youth. In a world filled with disdain, no (continued on page 138)Inside MTV(continued from page 93) one was saying, "We take you seriously, we believe in you, we know that in ways unwritten, you will change the world."

MTV's mission, it was decided, was to become the voice of the kids.

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VJ Steve Isaacs has heard the voice of the kids, and he doesn't like it. He's hosting one of MTV's Spring Break concerts in Daytona Beach, and the mood is getting ugly. The concert bill features a range of musical styles--Primus, Ugly Kid Joe, Salt-N-Pepa, Mr. Big--and the crowd is a weird mix of visiting college jocks and working-stiff locals. Almost all of them are drunk; many, for no discernible reason, are hostile. Scary convulsions of pushing surge through the crowd, smashing people against the barriers in front of the stage. Every so often, security guards lift a hysterical girl up over their heads and pass her to safety. A mosh pit opens up for Ugly Kid Joe, but the slam dancing is angry, not fun. Suddenly, people on the edge of the pit are slugging the moshers in the face, and some of the moshers are slugging back. It's mostly whites against blacks. The crowd close by lurches away, the crowd behind presses forward.

Isaacs senses what he calls "that riot vibe"--he is almost sick with fear. Every time he takes his position on the stage, the crowd starts chanting at him. "Steve Isaacs sucks!" hundreds of voices scream. "Steve Isaacs sucks!"

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Finding a way to bring MTV into its second decade isn't easy, considering that it was one of the defining popular cultural phenomena of the Eighties and that the resources available for reinventing anything in the Nineties are a trifle scant.

One disadvantage Freston faces is that MTV still labors to a large degree under the very Eighties vision of its cofounder, Bob Pittman. In 1981, Pittman, a 27-year-old former radio programmer (and sociology student), helped persuade Warner-Amex to sink $30 million into a rock-and-roll radio station with pictures. Four years later, Warner-Amex sold MTV to Viacom for $550 million. Pittman estimates it's probably worth close to $2 billion today.

Pittman left MTV in 1986. He now occupies a 27th-floor office in the executive suite at Time Warner, having returned to the inner circle of his benefactor, Steve Ross. On one of Pittman's windowsills there's an elegant globe, an appropriate decoration for a man who views the world from a certain conceptual distance.

It was Pittman who conceived the idea that MTV would subsist not just on the music of rock and roll but also on its attitude. Identifying with the kids was part of the channel's profile from the beginning--Freston says that "my" was always the most important word in "I want my MTV." But only up to a point. Pittman's vision had more to do with cool than with connection. The idea was to make MTV the epitome of hip; if the kids watched, the cool would rub off. And what better product to have if you're selling to kids than the promise of hip?

The irony is that the kids, who in real life tend to be gawky, unattractive and insecure, had no place in a video landscape where sophistication, attractiveness and self-confidence counted for everything. Indeed, for years it's been unofficial policy at MTV News not to let anyone under college age--the bulk of its audience--appear on camera. So strongly did Pittman resist breaking what he calls "the spell" of MTV that he refused to license its logo to merchandisers. "You don't want to see MTV T-shirts on fat, pimply-faced teenaged girls," he once said. "That's the danger."

With their voice-of-the-kids campaign, Freston and McGrath propose not only to invite the fat, pimply-faced girls inside MTV but to hand them a microphone and ask them what they think about the election.

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You want attitude? Stand by the elevators some morning in the lobby of the Viacom Building, just off Times Square in New York City, and watch the MTV people coming to work.

It's not hard to tell them apart from the rest of Viacom's employees--they're not the ones wearing suits and ties or silk blouses and pearls. More like black leather and Ray Bans, tights and combat boots, skull-patterned doo-rags and Pearl Jam T-shirts, ear studs and jeans.

The first thing you see when you get off the elevator on the 24th floor is a neat line of tree trunks stretching from the floor through the ceiling--no roots, no leaves, just trunks. The front desk is a huge plaster rock, so big you can barely see the receptionist seated behind it. Over her shoulder is a bank of five television monitors with JBL speakers (playing, of course, MTV at all times), plus a bubbling aquarium in the shape of the MTV logo. The rest of the reception area is done up in neo-tacky purple and yellow; the pipes and wiring in the ceiling are exposed.

Walking down the halls, you can hear Springsteen or Prince blasting from various offices. Notes announcing concerts are taped to bathroom doors. Few people seem to be as old as 30; interns who can't be much past 18 abound. As they walk brusquely past the job applicants who invariably wait by the tree trunks in reception, they exude an odor of triumph. They are special. They are inside. They belong at MTV.

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For the past several years, the principal goal of everyone who works at MTV, whether they know it or not, has been paying off the debt of a 69-year-old billionaire from Boston named Sumner Redstone. Redstone owns 83 percent of Viacom International Inc., a media conglomerate that owns five television stations, 14 radio stations, several major cable systems, four cable networks besides MTV, portions of three more cable networks, a pay-per-view company, a movie production company and syndication rights to hundreds of TV programs from The Cosby Show to Roseanne to The Twilight Zone to The Honeymooners.

Not many at MTV ever see Redstone, which is probably just as well, since he's known to hate rock and roll. He loves MTV, though. Redstone took on a mountain of debt to buy Viacom--$2.7 billion--and MTV has been a geyser of cash wearing away at that mountain ever since. Media research firm Paul Kagan Associates estimates that MTV produced some $94 million in operating revenues in 1992.

Redstone's debt is by far the most pressing legacy the Eighties left in Freston's lap. Freston doesn't complain--in fact, he talks about how supportive and unobtrusive Redstone is--but the strain shows. A former party animal himself (MTV's Spring Break coverage was his idea), Freston's style is laid-back, unconcerned, ironic. But, at the age of 47, his boyish good looks are more drawn than they used to be, his grin a little less cheerfully wry. Redstone is famous for running a tight ship--"He can watch the dime," Freston agrees--and he sets "pretty aggressive" goals for profit increases every year. Freston has delivered, but not much has been left to plow back into MTV. What investment there has been has gone largely to MTV Europe and to other parts of the MTV Networks division, which includes Nickelodeon and VH-1. McGrath got a slight increase in her production budget last year and expects another small bump this year, but the staff will tell you they're still running thin.

It's unstated policy at MTV that the looseness of the atmosphere and the cachet of working there compensate for conditions that in other respects are, as Freston puts it, "a couple of cuts above the industrial revolution." The low pay is legendary. Steve Isaacs might be a TV star, but there are months when he's not sure he can cover his rent. Long hours are another fact of life. Old-timers laugh about all the interns who arrive thinking they're going to be partying with rock stars, only to find that they're stuck in the office late into the night, every night. Duff says there was a sign in the studio for a while that read, Working at MTV is like having a Gorgeous Boyfriend Who Treats You like Hell.

The drive for profits creates some tension between MTV's need to be hip and its need to be popular. For the sake of image (and for the satisfaction of the music lovers who work there), the channel loves to be thought of as the place where the coolest new acts get discovered. For the sake of ratings, MTV wants to be the place where the biggest stars can always be seen.

It's nearly impossible to maintain that balance. The fragmentation in the music business in recent years hasn't made it any easier. People today tend to listen to one favorite kind of music--anything else is anathema. In response to that, MTV now programs itself much as a political party constructs a platform, laying in planks to attract various constituencies: a little metal, a little pop, a little alternative, a little rap, a little R&B. Put it all together and you have a playlist that is more diverse than it used to be and more adventuresome than many radio stations ever get. But it's still heavily weighted toward the mainstream--depressingly so, in the opinion of many at MTV.

Ted Demme is one of them. Demme, 27, is the white kid who cocreated Yo! MTV Raps in 1989. (He's also the nephew of director Jonathan Demme.) Yo! was a major success, and overnight it put to rest longstanding charges that MTV would not play black music. Nonetheless, the afternoon weekday version of Yo! was cut back from an hour to half an hour, then it was moved to midnight. Yo! now appears only on Saturdays from 10 to 11 P.M. Demme says he never got an explanation for the changes; the ratings, he says, were fine. But others say the show was turning too many white kids away from the channel.

True or not, the ghettoizing of what Demme and others at MTV consider the truest alternative music being made today is proof that MTV talks a hipper game than it walks. "MTV is a big money machine now," Demme says, "and the reality is that we have to be ratings-conscious because we have to pull in the bucks. What's frustrating for us is being told by our bosses to continually do alternative programming and not mainstream TV, and then hearing the upper management people go: 'Your ratings are down! You must do something to increase your ratings!' And the next thing you know, you see Michael Jackson on every half hour."

Freston makes no apologies for keeping MTV focused on the hits. It's easy, he says, to get too hip for the room. "When I hear a lot of people at MTV say, 'Man, the network's really looking good now,' I start to worry."

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It was hard to believe that anyone would go that far to promote a record, but there it was. MTV staff members gathered by their office windows on the 24th floor and looked across the street at the Marriott Marquis Hotel, directly into a room where a naked man was standing at the window of his room, facing outward, obviously involved in a spirited round of masturbation. No way could it be a coincidence that this was happening at the very moment when the Divinyls were pushing their latest single, I Touch Myself.

Turned out it was a coincidence, though. The guy in the hotel, who was still at it hours later, was arrested. Too bad, some thought: It was one of the most clever record promotions they'd ever seen.

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As always, music videos remain the heart and soul of MTV, but there, too, a downshift to humility is in progress.

After a decade of music videos, not many people in the business question MTV's ability to move product anymore. "I believe if you push anything on MTV it will work," says Linda Ferrando, senior director of national music video promotion for Atlantic Records. "You could take a potted plant and run it in heavy rotation and it will be a major star for a while."

Overstated, but only slightly. Hence the development of a new art form: getting the ear of MTV's music and talent-relations department. Stars such as Hammer and Fresh Prince can, and do, drop by to screen their latest videos for the staff. For lesser-known artists, getting in the door isn't that simple. Each Monday, MTV's 16-person music committee screens new videos. Between 50 and 75 come in each week, to compete for 25 openings on the schedule. The record companies know it pays to have an ally within the company who will help get a buzz going at the Monday meeting, which is why anyone who works at MTV, from Freston to production assistants, is a target for major schmoozing. Amy Finnerty, a 25-year-old music scheduler, carried the video for a little-known alternative band from office to office and insisted that people see it. The band's name was Nirvana.

There are other ways to attract attention. Bands such as Live and Poi Dog Pondering have played in the MTV lobby, and record-company executives have been known to stand by the elevators handing out compact discs. When former Kiss bassist Gene Simmons started his own record label, he had himself carried by two beautiful women into MTV's offices on a stretcher. Once there, he got down on his hands and knees (he was wearing his Kiss knee pads) and crawled around the floor, arms wide in supplication. The point of the joke was pretty clear: Who do I have to blow to get my records played?

The man in charge of MTV's talent-relations department is John Cannelli; second in command is Rick Krim. Both insist that stunts aimed at getting their attention are, if anything, counterproductive. Cannelli and Krim, in the no-nonsense spirit of the Nineties, prefer to keep their relationships with the record labels as professional as possible. Breaking in new bands, taking established bands to a higher level or helping a superstar stay on top is something in which they take great pride. To make it work, they say, takes cooperation and careful planning; they call it a proactive approach. Rather than sit around waiting for the videos to come in, the idea is to hold early meetings with a band's label or management--often months before a record is finished--to chart just how MTV fits into an act's overall marketing mix. Depending on how big an act they're talking to, Cannelli and Krim offer a broad menu of promotional tie-ins available on MTV, everything from interviews on The Week in Rock to guest appearances on other shows to tour sponsorship to contests. Never, Cannelli and Krim stress, does MTV imperiously tell the labels what to do. "We don't ever want to take the position, 'Fuck them, they need us more than we need them,' " says Krim. "That's not our style at all. It's a partnership with these people. Their success is our success. We would be nowhere without their stars."

Cannelli and Krim's emphasis on cooperation with record labels may well be their way of distancing themselves from the legacy of their former boss, Abbey Konowitch. Konowitch had been MTV's point man with the record industry since 1988. In 1991 Konowitch, pleading a need for change, stepped aside, ostensibly shifting his attention to MTV's special events. In July 1992 he joined Madonna's new record label, Maverick.

According to sources both outside and inside MTV, exercising the daily power to make or break careers ultimately went to Konowitch's head. One industry executive called him "an egomaniac" who managed to offend even those whose videos he did play, as well as those he didn't. "No one could rein him in," the executive said. "He was incredibly abusive." A criticism commonly heard about Konowitch is that he became more enamored with the music business than with the music itself. One source said he was the type of executive who would spend his time at a concert hanging out backstage with a manager instead of sitting out front listening to the band. But it was Konowitch's arrogance that ultimately brought him down. Asked who specifically in the record industry Konowitch might have offended, one source laughed and said, "It would be quicker to tell you who he didn't offend."

Konowitch also offended many of his MTV colleagues. Too often in interviews he seemed to take sole credit for choosing which acts MTV played. The final straw came when allegations of verbal sexual harassment at his previous job surfaced. After he departed, two of his former colleagues laughingly called it poetic justice that he'll now be "fetching coffee" for Madonna and her ball-busting publicist, Liz Rosenberg.

Cannelli and Krim are said to be music guys, as opposed to business guys, who can mend MTV's fences with the labels. How they'll handle all the powerhouses at the labels who want to push them around remains to be seen. It's a thin line between being partners with the record companies and being in their pockets. If King's X gets more attention on MTV than a band of its stature usually warrants, who's to say the fact that their manager also happens to manage Madonna doesn't have something to do with it? If MTV runs with a video by Roxette that is (in the words of one staffer) "a stiff," who's to say someone didn't feel they owed the president of Roxette's label a favor? Freston concedes such favors are a part of doing business and that the pleading from record companies has increased dramatically because there have been literally dozens of new labels launched in the past few years. MTV bends over backward to help them when it can, Freston says, because they invest so much money in the videos MTV plays. But he also concedes that favors sometimes hurt his business--the kid with a remote control doesn't care if the video he's about to zap belongs to some big shot who muscled it onto the channel.

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There's more to Duff, of course, than pancake flinging. When she isn't busy with her VJ gig, she works as a volunteer at a nursing home in her neighborhood. "If I left entertainment," she says, "I would be just as happy calling bingo next door."

Sometimes Duff brings her friends at the hospital freebies she gets at work: Aerosmith tour jackets, Run-DMC hats, even (get hold of yourself, Bob Pittman) MTV T-shirts. On warm days you can see them sitting outside on the sidewalk, lined up in their wheelchairs, sunning themselves in their rock-and-roll paraphernalia, watching the world go by.

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As hard as people work at MTV, and for as little money, most will tell you that they do get a chance to develop their talent. Some of the channel's top producers, including Ted Demme, are former interns. There's an exception to that rule, though. It involves MTV's most visible employees, its VJs. The VJs are supposed to be the kids' surrogates, their flesh-and-blood connection to MTV. Yet the VJs get almost as little respect inside MTV as they get from critics outside it. "Absolutely true," says former VJ Adam Curry. "VJs are seen as being on the absolute lowest rung on the programming ladder."

Part of the reason for that was a management decision early on that the VJs should not be allowed to get bigger than the channel. Mark Goodman, one of the original VJs, says that Pittman told them right at the start, "MTV is the star. You are not the star." Goodman says the rationale for that attitude was, from a management point of view, perfectly logical: "He wanted to keep us under control. He didn't want these huge egos on his hands." As a result, the VJs have always been kept on a short contractual leash. MTV controls all outside appearances; moonlighting is not allowed. The VJs who became perhaps the biggest celebrities, Adam Curry and Downtown Julie Brown, were able to negotiate more flexible terms when their initial three-year contracts expired. But both say MTV didn't let go without a fight.

It's likely as well that some of MTV's discomfort with its VJs stems from the inconvenient fact that they're human and therefore tend to grow old. While plenty of people will tell you that VJs aren't required to be under 30--Martha Quinn's comeback at 29 is the proof offered--the likelihood of sticking around that long is pretty remote. When Julie Brown left in 1991, Club MTV, the dance show she hosted, had been on for four and a half years. She had hoped to mature the program a little, to make it a little raunchier, to go for a more sophisticated audience. She'd noticed that while the kids gyrating under the disco lights on Club MTV were, at most, 20, more of the fans who greeted her on the street were older. "I went, 'Wow! I'm getting older!' " Brown says. "I didn't want to be the kind of girl who was sitting up there with packs of makeup on, dancing around like a sixteen-year-old. I just decided my tits couldn't take it."

Looking back, Brown acknowledges she probably should have realized that MTV wasn't going to be interested in maturing any show, including hers. "MTV works in dog years," she says, laughing. "Every so often it has to clean up, as it were, and head to the target audience." Meaning that anybody much older than the target audience can kiss the channel goodbye.

The current VJs have learned this lesson well. They've seen some of their predecessors disappear from view (Isaacs says former VJs go to "the white noise on the TV channel"), and they're determined it won't happen to them. Isaacs wants to use MTV as a springboard to a career as a songwriter and a musician. Duff plans to write, produce and direct feature films. "Oh, yeah, I don't want to do this forever," she says, chowing down a cheeseburger in a Greenwich Village café. "I'm going to get bored with it and people are going to get bored with me. I don't want to have a long tenure. I want to do it and do it well, and master it and have a great time, and then move on."

That's the spirit of the Nineties talking--pragmatic, maybe even a little cynical, determined to survive. VJs come, VJs go. Expendability is a fact of life.

MTV, on the other hand, will remain. Eternally youthful, eternally cool.

MTV is immortal. You're not.

"They exude an odor of triumph. They are special. They are inside. They belong at MTV."