Top Billin' by Bill Bellamy

Author:Bill Bellamy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

8

Messy Reality: Spring Break and the Beach House

“SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT”

Song by Nirvana

MTV always had a voyeuristic love affair with how young people moved about in the world. It was as much interest as it was a profitable obsession. This obsession also became their cash cow, and one that paid me well, so who am I to judge. The executives at the network loved seeing Gen X’s raw energy, creativity, passion, and fuckups in full color. That’s really why the network was created. It was conceived to put the lifestyle habits of that generation under a microscope to showcase what made them tick. In a lot of ways, MTV was the gatekeeper of youth. Older people (forties and beyond) secretly watched the channel to stay tethered to that raw energy even though they would outwardly pretend they didn’t understand it. Young people watched because they felt understood and at home.

As I described in an earlier chapter, the way the MTV office was laid out screamed frat house. Young startup tech offices of today have nothing on the atmosphere that MTV created. There was a natural and authentic cool factor built in. MTV was the land of hair spray, cut-off shorts, Day-Glo everything, crop tops, and biker shorts. The network, and executives, knew how to create environments that drew youth in and made them want to stay to hang out. Places where they felt comfortable enough to lose all their inhibitions, letting just about everything all hang out, and I do mean “all-hang-out!”

This was a carefree but certainly not a mistake-free time. More importantly, these were the years right before the internet took over and changed the way we interacted with each other. Without the fear of having their wild night played back for everyone to see, young people behaved like young people. They weren’t consumed with trying to one-up each other or ruled by the number of “likes” they could squeeze out of an event. Young folks in the 1990s knew how to live in the moment. That made them prime targets for the reality show circus. Naturally, MTV was the only one that could authentically draw them in and harness that magical energy.

I would say it slowly started to happen before their top-rated show The Real World first aired in 1992, but that one show kicked in the door for everything else. Whoever had the idea to throw a bunch of unsupervised horny twenty-plus-year-olds together in a cool-ass apartment and watch them self-destruct was an evil genius. Who needed writers and scripts when you had insecurities, four-letter words, raging hormones, and unlimited alcohol? Nature took over and it all unfolded for the world to see.

Based on the premise of watching animals at the zoo, these kids had no idea the magnitude of interest that would come their way. It was new, it was fresh, and human nature guaranteed that nobody would turn away from a train wreck. The show was a straight-up litmus test on society and a direct reflection of where we were at.

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