M2>MTV

At its genesis, M2, the long-needed solution to MTV’s well-documented refusal to play music videos, was the best thing ever associated with MTV. For its first year or so of existence, as a promotional thing, I was able to watch 2 on 1 at 2:00. For an hour on every snow, in-service, or otherwise off day, I was glued to the screen. Jancee Dunn, M2’s dreamy anti-VJ, would stumble through awkward chitchat and viewer-mail readings to introduce some of the newest, most obscure and most radical content ever seen on MTV. This stuff was way beyond even the progressive playlists of the Sunday night stalwart (until it was quietly dropped) “120 Minutes.”

Just look at this list of bands I had never heard of until I saw them on M2. Some are one-hit wonders, some not as good as initially advertised, and some not good at all. Regardless, this lineup is off the hook (in 1996-97 parlance):

Atari Teenage Riot
Bis
Cibo Matto—“Sugar Water”
Daft Punk—“Da Funk” and “Around the World”
Deftones
The Goops—the video that describes “How to Make A Movie Tie-In Music Video When You Can’t Get Spike Jonze by Jay and Silent Bob”
Jamiroquai
Local H
Michael Penn—"Try"
MxPx—"Chick Magnet"
Morcheeba
Portishead
Sneaker Pimps
Spice Girls
Stereolab
Sugar Ray
Tracy Bonham
Tricky—Yeah, there’s a lot of trip-hop on this list.
White Town—"Your Woman"

Some of the bands whose older, non-hit videos got play on the station include:

No Doubt
The Chemical Brothers—“Elektrobank,” in which Sofia Coppola performs a gymnastics routine
Bjork—many, including Michel Gondry’s video for “Bachelorette.”
Pixies
Lemonheads
Smashing Pumpkins
Yo La Tengo

This is only a taste of the variety on display on M2. Occasionally, they would devote a video block to offbeat themes, such as animated or one-shot videos.

M2 is now MTV2. It rarely shows videos.


p.s. Wow, I just found this New York Times article from 2000:

“To kick off the millennium, [MTV2] carved out three and a half months to broadcast every video in the MTV library in alphabetical order. ‘I think the final number was around 18,000 videos,’ said David Cohn, general manager of MTV2. ‘It was the heights to the depths.’”

Jancee Dunn