If you have cable television, you probably have a “default channel” – the channel you check as soon as you turn on the television, the channel to which you return after fruitless flip-throughs and during lengthy commercial breaks, the channel you leave on in the background while you do chores or wait for another show to come on. Comedy Central used to hold the default-channel position at my house, until the dark day when my TV screen flickered to life and revealed the irrepressible Carrot Top in all his apocalyptically anti-humorous glory. After Comedy Central’s abrupt fall from grace, a brief three-way skirmish ensued between A&E, Nickelodeon, and The Cartoon Network, from which A&E emerged victorious (with an assist from my Chris Noth craving, which only repeated viewings of old Law & Order episodes can satisfy). Alas, these feelings of devotion do not extend to the ubiquitous Bill Kurtis, and when I heard him gravely describe the demise of Lyle Menendez’s hairpiece for the thirtieth time, CNN vanquished A&E for the default channel spot and held it for quite a while – until VH-1’s Behind The Music Marathon Weekend. For 48 hours, the remote control gathered dust on my coffee table as I lay on the couch in a trance and listened to middle-aged musicians talk about the drugs they had taken, the depressions they had suffered, the friends they had maimed or killed in drunk-driving accidents, and the bandmates they had vowed never to speak to again. Even the sight of Loverboy lead singer Mike Reno attempting to recapture the band’s glory days in spite of a whopping 50-pound weight gain couldn’t intrude into my reverie. VH-1 rules.

VH-1 did not always rule. Ten years ago, VH-1 sucked rocks. The exclusive province of music so “lite” that it practically floated, VH-1 aired a seemingly endless loop of wretched videos by noxious adult contemporary artists. I don’t think my parents even bothered forbidding us to watch it, but if they did, they could have saved their breath, since the quickest of peeks at late-ë80s VH-1 programming could cause violent upper GI-tract spasms. Who wanted to see Michael Bolton sing so hard that viewers could identify individual arteries rupturing near the sad remnants of his hairline? Nobody. Who implored, “O ye maw of patchwork-vest-wearing Christian-pop Hades, may ye open thy jaws and discharge a perky believer named Amy Grant, and may she bring with her a plague of icky crossover hits”? Nobody. Who expressed the desire to see Anita Baker and Natalie Cole attired in emotive beige draperies? Nobody. Nobody invited Kenny G into their living rooms with his epileptic tootling, nobody mentioned filming a documentary called “When Root Perms Go Terribly Terribly Awry” based on Richard Marx’s Brillo pouf, nobody thought aloud that they might like to hear that catchy “Sussudio” tune again because it had thus far failed to induce a psychotic fugue, and nobody but nobody felt that the music-video medium suffered from the lack of accomplished prancing like that practiced by Rod Stewart. For some reason, though, VH-1 showed nothing else, save the occasional lugubrious single from Madonna’s latest soundtrack effort; the programming department’s idea of pushing the envelope consisted of a Miami Sound Machine video in which Gloria Estefan actually – gasp! – showed her midriff.

Slowly, though, VH-1 saved its pennies for the eventual purchase of a clue. Although the videos in its library still ran mostly in the vein of Enya and Jon “Nothing Says ëBurning Passion’ Like Singing In The Carport” Secada, at least it still played the damn things – not something you could say for its arrogantly hipper-than-thou sister station MTV. The soft-rock label continued to hang over VH-1 for years, but gradually programmers mixed in country rock and new folk while they kept inoffensive workhorses like Peter Gabriel in heavy rotation – and the viewing public’s perception of the station as “cheesy” finally started to work in its favor. Once VH-1 executives gave up on making the channel cutting-edge, they freed themselves up to position it as the guilty-pleasure channel. Armed with decade-old videos that MTV’s so-called “current” reputation and bottleneck of block programming wouldn’t allow it to air anymore, VH-1 created two shows that closeted ë80s-music devotees like me had waited years for: The Big ë80s and Pop-Up Video. The Big ë80s caught the wave of the Nu-Ro/ synth-pop resurgence niftily, but Pop-Up Video really took off. The show combined nostalgia for the early days of MTV with behind-the- scenes factoids and an ironic analysis of the music-video format that MTV had become too self-important to attempt. The put-downs persisted (Romy & Michele’s High-School Reunion referred to VH-1 as the over-thirty MTV) but at last VH-1 had figured out how to pull viewers from MTV – repackage old MTV and sell it to viewers who remember MTV before it sucked. In other words, if you want your MTV, you’ll find it on VH-1.

Once it became apparent to the VH-1 braintrust that the same twentysomethings who had ignored Aaron Neville would happily rot in front of recycled Rick Springfield, the great po-mo plundering of the ë70s and ë80s began. VH-1 satisfied the nostalgic appetite with Behind The Music; acts without enough material for the full Behind The Music treatment turned up on Where Are They Now, and acts with too much ground to cover spilled over into Before They Were Rock Stars. VH-1 had found an audience that wouldn’t get up from the couch during an Andy Gibb program if their houses caught on fire, but they made their demographic pandering less obvious than MTV’s and took an almost Warholian approach towards choosing artists for Behind The Music. The Dead and Milli Vanilli get equal time, and the narrator describes everyone’s descent into a haze of alcohol and drugs with the same grim relish.

When it jumped on the celebrity-bio bandwagon with both feet, VH-1 had reached a critical understanding of the average American’s relationship to fame. MTV continues to present famous people as lofty peaks of grooviness to which the rest of us should aspire. This works on a certain level, except that many of us resent and despise famous people. VH-1 senses this, and has chosen to showcase famous people as miserable boneheads at which the rest of us should point and laugh. This too works on a certain level – namely, the level on which I point at Mike Reno, carrying a beanbag of beer gut up front and deluding himself that he still looks foxy in that dorky headband, and guffaw “BWA HA HA HAAAAAAA!” – because we admire and emulate the famous, but we also envy them their success. As much as the parade of dated hairstyles and unfortunate fashion tickles us, the subtext tickles us even more: absurd wealth, unlimited access to narcotics, and stupendous feats of sexual positioning with abundant partners do not necessarily lead to happiness. We take comfort in the fact that “rich and famous” doesn’t always mean “fat and happy.”

It does, however, frequently mean “fat.” Just as often, it also means “bald,” or “broke,” and this, too, comforts us. We find it immensely gratifying that David Cassidy, a man who appeared in public wearing only overalls not once but many times, wound up in a Las Vegas floor show, and that he has visible hair plugs. We enjoy snickering at the jaunty driving cap Leif Garrett wears to disguise his rapidly retreating hairline. It pleases us that all of our griping about the New Kids On The Block met, at last, with justice. The famous people got their pictures taped up in kids’ lockers, they made wheelbarrows full of money, they spent the money on wheelbarrows full of coke, they snorted the coke off of custom-made chrome pianos and washed it down with a vat of bourbon, and then they either died or disappeared or passed the realtor licensing test or insisted that they could still rock, and we look at still shots of the famous people’s graves, or we see the famous people talking without moving their lips too much because moving their lips too much makes their wrinkles more obvious, or we hear the famous people proclaim “damn the Slimfast, full speed ahead,” and everybody goes to bed happy. Well, not the guy that Leif Garrett paralyzed from the waist down. Or Lindsay Buckingham either, now that I think about it, since he gets too much mileage out of sulking over Stevie Nicks. Or the guys in Jefferson Airplane who made the mistake of falling for Grace Slick as she bed-hopped past. Or the members of Grand Funk Railroad, because their runty little business manager dicked them over and they can’t even afford beds. But everyone else sleeps pretty well, not least because VH-1 answers the question “whatever happened to . . .” in frighteningly complete detail.

Oh, wait. The honchos at MTV probably don’t sleep all that soundly, now that I think about it, because if the question goes “whatever happened to MTV,” VH-1 answers that too. MTV got bloated. MTV insisted it could still rock, but it couldn’t bring the sound like it once did. Here, look at the old MTV, before the hair-weave. See those videos? Hear those songs you actually like? MTV used to play those. Too bad, really, the way MTV killed itself with The Real World and all those Spring Break specials. It had such a bright future, that MTV, so much talent.

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