What's Wang This Week

Maybe it's just because of all the holiday specials, but MuchMusic fucking sucks these days. Has it always been this bad? I remember that when I was younger, I could come home after school/class and there'd be a good, steady stream of music videos. There'd be the occasional show, like Spotlight, but those mostly centred around playing videos. I used to turn on MuchMusic and expect to see a few bands I hated, a few bands I liked, a few hot chicks, some Nickelback, you know.

Now I turn it on and it feels like about 60% of the time, I get "Video On Trial", which is the absolute worst. Instead of videos, we get this insipid tripe consisting mostly of stupid talking heads. Not interviews with musicians, no: totally marginal comedians, recognizable primarily from milk commercials and pre-movie advertisements in theatres; professional wrestlers; and Toronto-area media critics, all pretending that they're on "Remember the 80's?", only with music videos instead of the 80's. Who are these fucking jokers? Everything they say is completely played out and a waste of broadcast bandwidth. It doesn't stop there -- no, then there's the shows with the VJs themselves taking potshots at celebrities. And they keep showing the same stuff over and over and over. Where are the videos? I think the only time I've actually seen good, proper music videos just for the sake of music videos was between 2 and 3AM. Even Spotlight has become a 15-minute segment where they play one, maybe two videos.

This is terrible. This is what people say MTV has become, and it's sad that MuchMusic -- which had made a reputation as a music television station that still plays music television -- has sunk to that. In happier news, Burger King offers both a baked potato and a side salad as side dishes in their combos now.

In other news, I was at Future Shop a couple weeks ago and noticed that they had a bin full of double-pack DVDs (two for $25! What a savings). Most of them were dross, but there were some movies I wouldn't mind owning. The bundles mostly had some logic behind them. For example: the Steve Martin family comedy "Cheaper By The Dozen", bundled with the original version; "Star Wars I" and "Star Wars II"; "Man on Fire" and "Die Hard". Some of the bundles' logic was a bit tenuous, with a "Dr. Dolittle"/"Garfield: The Movie" doubleheader, and "Fat Albert" and some other movie starring only black people (I don't remember what it was, but I know it wasn't "Barbershop" or "Barbershop II"). The one that stumped me, though, was the bundling of "Elektra" and "Dude, Where's My Car?" What's the thread there?

Current Music: Rod Stewart - Handbags and Gladrags