“Media Man,” Flash and the Pan

Do you know that song? Probably not. Almost no one does. It’s an amazing pop song with insightful, cynical lyrics and stellar production. Check it out at the end of this post, if you’re interested.

I have all kinds of crap like that rattling around in my head. Most of it is because my dad got MTV just a few months after it started, and I was an 11-year-old kid lapping it up. In those days they showed 13 or 14 videos per hour.

I love YouTube, because I get to see a lot of these old videos. VH-1 Classic was marvelous for such for a while, but they’ve gotten into showing movies and “specials” and what-not, and it’s really nothing like it used to be two years ago when it was, well, 13 or 14 videos per hour.

But see, now and again the lawyers descend upon YouTube and have all of this stuff deleted. I have a couple of favorites I have to re-add every month or two because of a lawyer pass.

What pisses me off about it is that I can’t go buy a lot of this stuff even if I want to. You want to zap something that’s commercially available, lawyer jackasses? Fine. But what if I can’t get it anywhere, at any price? What is the loss?

Put it out there for me to purchase. If I don’t have that legal and legitimate opportunity, then leave it alone on the video sharing sites. How would that be?

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3 thoughts on ““Media Man,” Flash and the Pan”

  1. I HATE the lawyer-sweeps. I’m with you on that.

    I, too, remember when MTV and VH1 actually played MUSIC. It makes me sad that they’ve changed the format SO much that one can’t even find a video anymore. I kind of wish they’d put out a retro channel, so we can see Wrapped Around Your Finger and Addicted to Love again…

    Reply
  2. VH-1 Classic was that retro channel. It was a lot like the old days. You could turn it on while you folded laundry or something and just about always see/hear something that made you smile.

    Now it’s just another pile of shit, indistinguishable from any of the other non-music-playing “Music Television” properties.

    Reply

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