Beavis, Butthead and MCA

I was never a huge fan of the Beastie Boys, and I respected them too much to pretend to be one. My appreciation was always awed more on admiration for their creativity than a particular love of the results. Still, the death of Adam Yauch (aka MCA) is sad for many reasons, one of them being the reminder that the medium that brought him and his spiritual brothers fame is nothing like what it once was. Though it's been three decades since the debut of MTV, the decline actually started well before the midpoint of its life. Looking back, the peak moment was quite obvious, and, though he probably didn't see it at the time either, Yauch was a key contributor to that peak.

One of the best things about Beavis & Butthead was that when they made fun of music videos between the "real" cartoons, they were as willing to make fun of the great ones as they were the terrible. In the mid-90s, there were few videos greater than the the Beastie Boys/Spike Jonze video for "Sabotage".

We didn't know it at the time, but the high-water mark for MTV had arrived. Watching Beavis & Butthead's slightly bemused reaction to "Sabotage" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YsiTUxe4MI&feature=youtube_gdata_player) was the moment where MTV's original mission to play music and the network's desire to expand into other forms of programming were in perfectly balance. It was all downhill from there.