15 years too late, MTV drops “Music Television”

Thanks to the digitization of our world, every aspect of pop culture has become spread so thin as to be almost totally unreadable

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On Monday, an enormous cultural shift took place (or rather, was finally solidified) in a subtle and quiet way. MTV, that jurassic arbiter of cool, unveiled its new logo, which no longer features the words “Music Television” underneath the iconic “M” and its accompanying tag-like “TV.” The logo, created in 1981 by designer Frank Olinsky, is one of the most recognizable the world over, and has become a signifier of the nonconformist attitudes of the teens and young adults who grew up with the network and its myriad music videos - Generation X, as we call them, and to some extent Generation Y.

Funny, then, that MTV has become what it has. In the ’80s and through the mid-’90s, the network filled its programming schedule with music-centric material, from the always exciting “Yo! MTV Raps” to “120 Minutes”, which helped define the “Alternative” rock era in the 1990s. In those days, even MTV’s non-music programming was cutting-edge; though “Beavis and Butt-Head” seems tame by today’s standards, it was a magnet for controversy in its heyday. And although “The Real World” is singlehandedly responsible for the great shitsmear that is “reality” television today, it manged to remain culturally relevant for at least a few seasons.