Too hard for MTV, not black enough for BET, just let me be.
I turned down a lot of reality shows in the past, but MTV, back in the day, was just the coolest with Cribs to Pimp My Ride.
Anything that has to do with rock seems to be on the decline. There's not a lot of rock stations or MTV anymore, you just go on Youtube.
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'm an atrocious business man, because it's just not the way I think about things. And that's pretty much what all that GrammyMTV kind of stuff is tied into.
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.
MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
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.
I spent the '80s in the Soviet Union and when I came to America it was '89 and I was in an immigrant bubble and we didn't have MTV or cable, so I kind of discovered the '80s when I was already older, maybe in college. And I continued to have this romantic obsession with all those films and there's this sound I hear in my head and it's kind of this bittersweet romantic, dark sound.
And I'm not a personality; otherwise I'd be coming out with an album, performing on MTV. All that stuff is possible and I can do that tomorrow. I just have no need.
God bless pop music and God bless MTV.
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.
People got extremely comfortable with being able to turn on their television and see MTV say, "This guy's hot you should buy this record. "
When I started on MySpace, people wanted to support me, but once I rose to fame with the MTV show, they felt like I had abandoned them for some reason, that I was too famous to talk to them anymore.
White people have always shown their superiority over blacks with their feet, moving out of black neighborhoods with the fear that their kids will turn into one of them. And now, through the magic of MTV, damned if it didn't turn out that way!
The fans like the idea we do what we want. It's not an act. Screw the record company and the beaten path. Without MTV or radio, we still have a huge underground following.
MTV was such a great training for me. I did live interviews with everyone from Michael Jackson to Madonna.
It could be the sort of declining grip of the American MTV-nation culture-the fact that MTV doesn't play so much music anymore.
MTV didn't exist in 1980, but by 1982, it had gotten to be a force to be reckoned with.
Today, MTV doesn't play videos anymore, but YouTube certainly has become the next MTV.