Adam Curry: MTV Had a New Kids on the Block Problem

What is this? They got the Gopher t-shirt. Oh, there you are. Yeah. Everybody? Hold on, let me put the glasses on. Hold on, I want to see that. I want to see that. Look at you, dude. Oh my god. Do those days- See, I'm on the musical map. Keep it here. Keep it here, everybody. Do those days feel like a different human being when you look back at that? Like, that's a long-ass time ago. Because of the time, yes, I'm sure- What MTV was like back then and just life back then. Well, don't you have that yourself just with age? Yeah, for sure. So, of course, but it's all still a part of me. That MTV period is so definitively closed because it's just not- that will never come back. I mean, it was a magical time. It was fun. And to this day, it can be in the oddest places. Usually a guy in a suit and tie- Good reflexes, bro. Oh, that I have. Yeah. I can catch- people drop a bottle, I catch it on the way down. That's my superpower. You get Tourette's and you get a superpower. That's my catching stuff. Super reflexes. Sorry, go ahead. Usually a guy in a suit and tie and all of a sudden it's like, fucking head back. It's bald, man. And the tie comes off and like, metallic a t-shirt. That's hilarious. And I love that. And we share that. And that's a shared experience that only our generation has. And then once BET started getting the- MTV had to buy BET because they were getting world premieres from Michael Jackson. So that was the whole thing there. And just it got commoditized. They were so smart to go on. The people who were running at the time were very smart to go with long form programming. They saw it with remote control. And then of course they already had seen a little bit of it with- what's the first reality show they had? I forget what it's called. The real world? Real world. Yeah. So they- because the MTV ratings during the day were 0.5 basically. And I was always proud that I would sometimes break one, but I had interesting shows that people like to watch, like Dial MTV. That was the precursor to Total Request Live, Carson Daly's show. So I did that. And that was just the top 10 of the day, but people had the idea that they were making a difference in the chart, which they weren't because it was number one. Can you guess what was number one requested every single day? What? New kids on the block. And they- it was the biggest problem in MTV. So sometimes they just did, oh, they didn't make it on. Or we're not playing anything under number five today. Oh, new kids on the block are 6G. Which it was- it was kind of bullshit. Kind of bullshit. Yeah. Didn't that come up recently with Justin Bieber with like Twitter? Like when Twitter trending topics started. Yeah. Like they couldn't figure out what to do. He trended so hard on Twitter. They had to stop him from being number one. The what? They probably still would be number one. Or like Taylor Swift or Beyonce. Someone would be up there all the time. Oh yeah. Of course. If anyone has any idea that this is fair, these rankings and ratings, fuck that. It's still weird. It's all weird because everybody's competing.