If you're over the age of, say, 30, you'll vividly remember a time when MTV actually played music and one of its best shows was Unplugged.
The format, when you think of it, was breathtakingly simple. You put artists in a room and got them to play their songs without production or electronics, just acoustically. Sometimes, it was with guitars and tambourines, other times it was a piano.
Whatever they did, it created some of the most beautiful renditions of popular songs you're likely to hear. Nirvana's Unplugged album, for example, became a sort of epilogue for Kurt Cobain's career whilst Eric Clapton's Unplugged album was one of his best in years.
Since MTV all but abandoned playing music, its ratings have understandably begun to slump. However, it's now planning a glorious return to the days of yore by bringing back one of its most iconic shows. In a recent interview, one of MTV's most senior execs, Erik Flanningan, discussed the television station and why people just want the old MTV back.
""As annoying as it can be, I read into it that people are always rooting for us to be what they loved about us. That doesn’t mean we have to go back to the past and return to an era that you can’t re-create," explained Flannigan.
However, he did bring up Unplugged and discussed the new spin on it and whether or not pop artists today are capable of even doing Unplugged. "If you think about the most influential artists and records of the last 12 months, there is a different way to hear that music." VH1 has already taken up where Unplugged left off with Storytellers; its most recent one being Ed Sheeran here in Whelan's.
The figures released from MTV do show an incredible drop in ratings over the past number of years, with the station falling from a US average of 778,000 in 2014 to 578,000 in 2015.
Here's hoping people still want their MTV.
Via Indiewire
