I used to watch music videos and just feel the mood they were trying to evoke. I’d believe that the peformers really were that cool. It was all so sexy and exciting. I just wanted to pass through that TV screen into a cooler and more passionate world.

Given that I kind of did manage to live my life so that I got to pass through the screen to the other side, I actually only got cable television because I was offered a really good deal on getting it with a cable modem. Time Warner Cable recently bought out Comcast, who I think bought out RoadRunner, and maybe AT&T was in there somewhere. I didn’t totally follow all the transfers and my cable bills literally did not have a return address on the envelope for a while because the changeovers were so hasty.

The upshot of all of this is that I recently had a channel line-up re-shuffle and it is easier for me to TiVo lots of music video shows, fast forward through stuff I don’t like, and still get to enjoy lots of videos I do like and might not have come across otherwise. Music videos used to be one of my favorite forms of entertainment and one of the only types of television I would watch. My college had a room in the student center with a gigantic projection TV and a friend of mine (who had a first and last name which were surreally both slang for penis – he was even more surreally named after his father) and I used to sit there and watch MTV on it, missing stuff we were supposed to do because we were just going to stay until the good video came on. When I finally had access to a television with cable and a closed door, I wasted no time finding which shows had the highest preponderance of rock videos I found worthy of self-pleasure.

My new Time Warner Cable line-up includes a couple of MTVs and VH1s and CMTs, and the delightful relative newcomer FUSE. I should be in heaven, but I have trouble stopping the negative ideation those video channels evoke in me today. The problem is that I have too much of a sense of how the sausage is made and I’m discomfitted by a lot of their cooking methods. I see a video with some teenage boy singing about how wrong it is to beat your girlfriend and the song is catchy enough and the boy is okay-looking and has a nice enough voice which works for the material. But I can’t stand the pretense that some teenager wrote the song.

Cablevision Systems Corporation, the corporate parent of FUSE, has sports holdings which account for nearly 20% of their revenues. I wish music understood teamwork like the world of sports does. Sports fans know and understand that, while some people are really standout stars, there are a number of positions which need to be played and the coaches get airtime too. If someone gets too flamboyant in drawing attention to themselves, they can get penalized for showboating. In the world of music, there is this desperation to pretend that the lead singer just came up with everything. Unfortunately, the product is so manufactured that a lead singer who really can come up with his or her own songs, style, and message is likely to be buried and ripped-off and asked to change, but never played by the music video stations. A headstrong artist is a pain in the ass and nowhere near as desirable as a compliant and good-looking youth who can sing and dance and sign contracts which offer a low percentage.

And I can’t stop myself from thinking about how the singer doesn’t understand the words he is singing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about contract law. I can’t stop thinking about how roughly seven companies own most media in America. I can’t stop thinking about how the music industry’s response to YouTube was not to offer kids in Peoria the video-directing opportunity of a lifetime, but to offer those talented kids in the boonies the opportunity to line the industry’s pockets for nothing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about how many talented musicians I know, who will never get a real chance, precisely because they are the whole package, in an industry which has come to prefer people who can fit snugly into small roles.

And then I find myself wondering about a band like Evanescence. The band has sold more than fourteen million albums worldwide and they tend to be marketed somewhat as a Gothic band. I’ve had some interaction or other with someone from most bands which are marketed as Gothic or industrial or deathrock or anything along those lines. If I haven’t, then someone I know has. Either I or someone I know will have interviewed someone from the band, partied with someone from the band, had sex with someone from the band, or at least shown up at a nightclub and had a conversation in line for the bathroom with someone from the band. But nobody I know has ever mentioned having anything to do with anyone in Evanescence.

Dictionary.com defines the band’s name as “to dissipate or disappear like vapor” and the Gurl.com top interview in a Google search for amy+lee+evanescence+interview explains the band’s name as “The word Evanescence means to dissipate like vapor, it puts an image in your head of like a ghost/specter that isn’t really there.” The Gurl.com interview has no interviewer credit. So I watch videos late at night and I finally start wondering if Evanescence really exists in any man-in-the-street sense of what a band is or if some enterprising producer for the surreally-named Wind Up Records just made up the whole thing to, you know, wind up the public. And sell fourteen million records. Which is a lot.

The question is, if Amy Lee and Terry Balsamo don’t really write Evanescence songs, don’t pick out their own clothes, don’t have the personal lives claimed for them, or maybe don’t even speak English, does that make their performances less enjoyable for their audience? If it does reduce the pleasure, does that mean it is good and reasonable to hide the origins of the music and the performers? Is it okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier? Is it still okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier, but the lies mean a genuine struggling band, who tells the truth, can not compete?

Someone, please tell me you have met Amy Lee from Evanescence and she speaks English like a goth girl from Arkansas. Someone, please tell me how to block the part of my brain which wonders if Evanescence is a hoax, when all I really want to do is watch some cool videos.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.