By Doug McKean

* He didn't actually revise it, he just
wrote the article about the revising of it.
He may have revised the article, though.

The best way to become accepted by the mainstream is to present enough of a threat to it that it has no choice but to accept you. Governmental and cultural institutions have evolved to the point where they bend quite a bit to avoid the risk of breaking. Witness the welfare state, the marketing of the notion of "cool" in the advertising industry, and now the rewriting of rock music's history by the people at VH1. Some of their recent Countdown shows have made mention of underground acts from the past and present such as Husker Du, The Replacements, X, and Fugazi. Does this signal a newfound support for underground music on the part of the music industry, or an attempt to subvert the historical record in order to maintain some semblance of credibility? First of all, I have to admit to watching these shows. It's a guilty pleasure, and I'm a big enough fan of baby boomer rock (Stones, Who, Hendrix) that there's usually an interesting perspective on some of that music for someone who didn't experience it during its first go round. What I did experience during its first go round was MTV in the late 80's and early 90's, and I remember enough of it that I can see what's going on in these countdown shows. During "The 100 greatest Hard Rock bands" or something like that, Fugazi shows up as # 90 something. How does VH1 decide it wants to give airtime to a band that's never made a video, been on a major label, or charged more than $8 for a show? I wondered where Fugazi fit into their scheme. Then, Husker Du shows up as #80 something. Now, something's wrong here, I thought (aside from the notion that Husker Du and Fugazi don't blow Aerosmith out of the fucking water any day of the week and twice on Sunday. They should be in the top 20!!!). Husker Du never got any support from MTV while they were around. Fugazi continues to go about their business without the support of MTV. So why do these bands show up on these shows? About a week later, I'm watching the "Top 100 albums of rock n roll" and The Replacements "Let it Be" is # 70 something. Now this is too much. Did any of the folks at VH1 listen to "Seen Your Video" before they decided to air this segment? Have they watched the "Bastards of Young" video? I began to see a pattern of VH1 recognizing bands that were antagonistic towards everything that VH1/MTV stands for. The confusion started to disappear. No matter how many Duran Duran and Madonna Behind the Musics they air, there's no getting around the fact that between the demise of the Sex Pistols and the rise of Nirvana, the music industry put out virtually nothing of any quality whatsoever. Sure, there was the underground scene that many bands came out of and eventually signed major label deals, but popular music was awful in the 80's. Then, there was a period of a year or two when some decent bands made it big in the early 90's, but Nirvana was followed by Bush, then Candlebox, then Collective Soul, and I think you see a pattern, and now we hear the faint echoes of Alice in Chains in whatever godawful band with detuned guitars and gloomy lyrics they put on the table this week. Now that VH1 has embarked on its mission to tell the story of popular music over the last 50 years, they have to deal with the reality of how embarrassing most of the last 25 years is, therefore, they need to include some respectable bands in their history, no matter how antagonistic towards the music industry they might be, or how sorely overlooked they were when they could have used this kind of support. So, have MTV/VH1 changed their tune? The answer is certainly no. The music business is here to sell products. It will sell what it deems to be marketable at any given time. Once in a while, the stars align, and a truly great band like Green Day, Rancid, or Nirvana can become the flavor of the minute, and maybe the marketing strategy will even emphasize the quality of those bands over everything else out there, but I think we've all seen how fleeting those moments are. The nature of mass marketing is that a trend or a fashion can only last for a short time before it's on to the next one. When the music industry deems something of quality to be the next big thing, it doesn't signal a change of heart on their part, and when they latch on to something of quality 15 years after they ignored it, it's probably to cover its own ass when the truth and its preferred version of the truth become too inconsistent with each other for anyone to believe. Does MTV seem to be doing anything to assure that these sorts of oversights (to give them more than the benefit of the doubt) don't happen again? That's an easy question. Popular music is even worse now than it was during the 80's. Maybe in 15 years, all the rock critics who are currently missing the boat in order to analyze Britney Spears lyrics will tell us how great the Thumbs, or the Hudson Falcons, or Dillinger Four were. Aren't you glad you can say you were there for it during the first go round?