Before MTV2 was MTV...2, there was M2, a 24-hour music video channel launched in 1996, with the coolest VJs (Jancee Dunn, Matt Pinfield) and a ton of awesome music videos. It was the first place I ever heard/heard of Pavement, Wesley Willis, Daft Punk, Daniel Johnston, and stuff from Pinkerton. It is how I learned who Spike Jonze was. You know, cool stuff. Bands, songs, and ideas you couldn't find out about anywhere else as a preteen in pre-internet rural Arkansas. The channel was low-budget, not widely carried, and was as much of an art piece as it could have been considering. We didn't get commercials and Punk'd re-runs (or Buzzkill reruns, I guess), we got alt rock, ska, and artsy-fartsy weirdo bumpers in between. Some really cool ones aren't online, but a few are. Here is a youtube-based repersentation of what I used to watch every day during the summers.
Voodoo Glow Skulls-Fat Randy (embedding disabled)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJnxZ2vIuNM
As time went on, the channel began to make more and more "sense," until it really was just MTVtoo. But for a few glorious years (96-00), it was a tiny revolution.
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