Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We've shown everyone we are musicians first and foremost: we'll produce our own albums and play The 100 Club. We earned people's respect. We're not the band on MTV, wearing a bunch of makeup. We've proved we're the real deal.
We had such a huge fan base, they couldn't ignore us anymore. MTV was playing us on 'TRL.' We even did a TRL-sponsored tour that was Good Charlotte and us.
It was really weird, when this thing started, to hear lawyers and MTV people calling me and actually saying 'ButtHead.' People tried to avoid it too.
MTV wanted to downplay our lifestyles and pretend we weren't getting the checks that we actually were, so I think that was the blurry line between the lives we were really living and the lives that they wanted us to live, and things like that.
A lot of MTV's programming is hip-hop based, and the messages are usually all about bling bling. A lot of hip-hop artists sing about stuff that's more important, but they seldom get heard. The ones who get heard are the ones saying, 'Think about yourself. Make your money. It's all you. Everybody have a good time and party.'
On MTV, the dialogue can be a little darker, more interesting and edgy... the animation is just phenomenal. It's a CGI program that's doing all the animation.
You have a specific, defined audience-at MTV, they assume the audience to the news is 15 to 30 years old and they do a lot of research about the things they're interested in.
I had a somewhat religious upbringing. Not strict, but it was there, and I'm kind of thankful for that. If you grow up just watching MTV, that's its own form of religion, and it's not even based on happiness or communal responsibility. I mean, try to construct a worldview out of that.
Nicki Minaj, I'm at MTV. I'm going to be honest with you: I love you. I like you. I want you; I want you to be mine. Only reason I'm not telling you this face to face is because I understand that you're busy.
Everyone related to me in my circle was from church: church friends, church school, church activities. All my friends weren't allowed to watch MTV or go to PG-13 movies or listen to the radio, so I didn't really know anything different. That's how I was raised.
We also had an "in" with MTV those days. Tara Reid was engaged to Carson Daly. She just called him and was like, "Do you want to be in the movie?" So they kind of had to make it work.
I think because there is the constant looming threat of nepotism and judgment, I really tried to separate what I was doing at MTV, my auditions, anything I was doing creatively, from my family.
I never really got any attention until I was on MTV. I became a household name because I was on every day from 3-4pm. I wasn't prepared for it - how mean they can be in the press. I wouldn't say I'm jaded now, I guess I'm just used to it.
I met Matt when he was in Busted. I was working at MTV and I'd see him wearing baggy jeans, waddling around like a duck so they didn't fall down. He used to wear makeup and have weird hairstyles. But I remember thinking underneath all that was a really cute guy.
I came to New York and started doing stand-up and improv, and started auditioning for commercials and voiceovers and stuff. My first job was on a pilot of that prank show called 'Boiling Points' on MTV.
My show on MTV, as outrageous as it was, it was also making a point, which was, 'Look at what we're doing here. This is something that you don't see on television every day, because you're not allowed to do this on television.'
I have never made a cent off a record in my life. I have never recouped enough, and I never sold enough. When people see you have a song on MTV, they think you are doing well - but you know, the way the traditional label deal was set up, it is really hard for an artist, unless they sold a lot, to see anything.
But MTV relishes its vestigial role as a star maker, so every year it puts all its clout into making the VMAs the biggest, splashiest, loudest show-biz extravaganza of the year, honoring all this music for existing, after a year of paying barely any attention to it.
I was on MTV's 'Real World' at the time when 'Queer Eye' came out. I remember, the first time I won an award, I got the award, and they were like, 'It's a tie! With 'Queer Eye!'' I never thought that I would one day follow in their footsteps.
[MTV] just wanted a regular person that knew a decent amount about music.I'm so used to doing solitary interviews. You have some control - it's quiet, it's just you with your tape recorder and the person. Then when I was in front of the camera, I broke out in hives, which I continued to do well after I got the job.
MTV and the culture industry never are talking about community relevance, hood organization, they aren't talking about ethical codes, they aren't talking about forms of political organization, they don't speak about codes inside the jails. What they talk about are superficial things.
I think a lot of people who become music fans have that moment where they break from their parents' music, they break from the radio and MTV - at least in my generation, they did, and MTV isn't really a thing anymore. And you discover something that defines you, that is outside of the mainstream.
I was inspired by a lot of people when I was young. Every band that came through town, to the theater, or the dance hall. I was at every dance, every night club, listened to every band that came through, because in those days we didn't have MTV, we didn't have television.
With MTV in the '80s, you made your album but then you needed to use any money you made to create a video - instead of being able to use that money to pay for you and your band to live on while you wrote new songs. So MTV upped the ante of looking for one hit. Conceptual bands who didn't have a hit were going to lose.
I tore up my knee break dancing. I have no idea how that happened. Apparently these legs are meant for swimming, but not dancing. I was watching an MTV video, thinking, 'I can do this.' Definitely not. I heard a pop. I sat down and it blew up like a watermelon. I had to go to the hospital and get surgery.
Vanilla Ice sold ten million records. For him to be on MTV, it made me feel like it could be done.
The Internet's completely over. [...] The Internet's like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. [...] They just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you.
I think I got nominated in the MTV Brand New Top 10 because I'm 3x world time karate champion, and I'd probably just beat everyone up if they didn't put me in it. They were all scared!
Working in MTV's development team, my days would consist of pitches and deciding which concepts we wanted to buy. We would then develop those into a pilot. Very few ended up making it to a full series, but if they did, I would manage the project alongside the show's creators.
Here's what set MTV apart from places like ABC News and other bastions of liberal news dissemination: we had a prime demographic, a twenty-four-hour cycle, and an aura that simply could not be manufactured, bought, or faked by the major networks.
I was one of the first veejays to take the camera out on location, and that's what was unique about MTV at that time.
A friend of mine - a cameraman at MTV - lost a lot of weight from cycling, and I thought I'd try it, too, thinking whenever you look at a cyclist they all look super-skinny, so hey, why not? But then it turned into such a psychologically satisfying thing.
I remember after a year in London, I was at an MTV party and a friend saying to me that it was such a brave thing to do to come over to London by myself. I never thought it was a big deal. It was my dream. I am so independent. It is just ridiculous. I am too independent for my own good.
I actually didn't even think about "Josie and the Pussycats" . I was like, "Oh yeah we kind of took some shots at MTV," but I think everyone had a good sense of humor about it. People either got that movie completely, or completely missed it and dumped all over it.
Iron Maiden and Metallica are bigger now than they ever were. They're playing stadiums across the entire planet. Even though it seems like their heyday was back when MTV and the radio played their songs all the time, the truth is that they've gotten bigger now because they play all the time, and people know they're going to get a great show.
For me and MTV, it was always the MTV year-end countdowns. It was what I'd look forward to honestly every year just as much as Christmas. When Christmas was over, the top 100 videos of the year would lead up to the ball drop.
I worked at NBC and MTV for two years, and it was very interesting to see the comparisons of audiences and the way that I would have to present a story to the two different places.
After getting the job at MTV, the challenge was, 'How do I start my career as a television host without people holding my dad's career over my head?' It's a very easy thing for people to look to my dad and say, 'Well, he got his job because of this.'
When I started my show, it was a public access show in Canada, and I was a broadcasting student in the early '90s, years before I was on MTV. We were kids sort of experimenting and trying to take on the system - you know, the media machine.
As one of the first African-Americans to be out on a reality program, MTV's 'The Real World: Philadelphia,' I understand the courage it takes to live your truth on a national platform, the importance it holds to LGBT communities of color, and the power it has to create a greater conversation within American culture.
People started hitting me up on Twitter cuz I was getting millions of views on YouTube and WorldStarHipHop.com and they saw me on MTV with Soulja Boy.
I loved my time at MTV because the music was critical; the music was our thrust. That's what the channel was all about. And I loved that, because we were pushing the limits with how we were covering and interviewing and consuming music and bands.
I want to do an 'Extreme Makeover' show. You know that MTV show 'I Want To Have A Famous Face'? Well, I want to do a new show. I want to have a different famous face.
When we started, our style of music wasn't on MTV. It wasn't cool, and it wasn't popular. The only bands who were even kind of similar were Blink-182 and Green Day. But we don't sound like those bands, even if people throw us in that category now.
At MTV, although the audience is smaller, I found it more interesting to deliver news to a specific group of people, because my story then did not have to try to be all things to all people.
When my first show was on MTV, and it was this outrageous persona, I think people certainly didn't know what to think. But it was a performance. I'm sure people didn't know that it was a performance; they thought maybe I was just nuts, but that was all intentional.
I love MTV. I watched 'Beavis and Butthead,' 'Wayne's World,' 'Yo! MTV Raps.' And they used to have music videos on there. When I got the chance to be on MTV, I took the first opportunity.
The MTV thing is the thing that I will always tip my hat to because that was like my acting class and how I got comfortable in front of a camera and how I kind of created my own thing.
If the breaking news event has something to do with young people, specifically with MTV's audience, there was a higher chance that I would actually go cover it with a television camera instead of just write the story myself and read it on the air.
The thing to keep in mind is that's how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.