90s Videos

Remember the 90’s? MTV used to play music videos with some regularity. (For my younger readers, MTV was a cable channel that was supposed to be like broadcast radio (ok, an MP3 player) but on your TV. You wouldn’t just hear your favorite music, but see your favorite bands performing said music. Often with special effects or some other sort of visual vignette. Now you know MTV because of some social-disease laden, alcoholic, Eastern, beach bums with bad nicknames and no impulse control. But it was half like that in the 90’s too, so don’t feel so depressed.)

Gun control in the US was at its zenith. And any reference to firearms in an MTV video was bleeped out like it was profanity. Like the very existence of firearms was an obscenity. Like ‘they’ were trying to influence the culture into seeing an object as some sort of unacceptable independent moral actor. Like Britain. When Der Spiegel says the US has to stop trying to be like Europe, we REALLY need to stop trying to emulate Europe.

Oddly, Uncle mentioned 80s music a few ago.


Yeah, I'm probably making too much of it. MTV censored a lot of stuff. Drug references, fire references, knife references, butt references. And they weren't even consistent with their censorship. So perhaps I am being too oversensitive with my observations.

MTV did go from this:




to this, with 'barrel of a .45' editted out on broadcast:


back to heavy rotation of this, with 'barrel of a gun' included.

All in a mere 5 years.