Remember when there was a cable channel
that played music videos? There still is one. It's called
Fuse.
Franz Ferdinand blazes through six songs in a cramped Midtown
Manhattan studio. It's your typical
MTV scene - teenagers singing
along, fists pumping, cameras swiveling to catch it all - only it's
not MTV. This is Fuse, the Cablevision-owned music channel poised
to place a chink in that other channel's teenage monotony - I mean
monopoly. ¶ "This ain't your mother's music television," says VJ
Steven Smith as he films outros for the commercial break. He also
adds a cuss word, but I'll leave out that part.
Now that MTV has become reality-show central and VH1 is the
nostalgia channel for TV-addicted adults, there's only one thing
missing: actual music. "Empty-vee" was the slogan Fuse came up with
a few years ago. They're good at that kind of irreverence. One Fuse
ad showed Sally Struthers on a Save-the-Children-type poster that
read, "Every day thousands of music videos go unplayed." Fuse has
been around for a while - it used to be called MuchMusicUSA - but
now the company is throwing its muscle behind a campaign to
increase the channel's visibility and make its way into teenagers'
hearts and iPods.
"We want to be wherever kids are, whenever they want us," says
Catherine Mullen, the channel's new general manager, who came to
Fuse from MTV UK.
To that extent, Fuse is almost hysterically interactive, beginning
with its massive website. Kids can also text the new sign outside
the studio on Seventh Avenue, and their messages may appear on the
ticker. The channel's countdown show,
Daily Download,
doesn't merely run through the most popular videos (although it
does do that); it counts down the nation's most downloaded songs
(thus the name).
Daily Download, hosted by Smith and Marianela Pereyra, is
filmed live in the studio every weekday at five p.m., with
celebrities dropping by to chat while teens sit on risers
TRL-style. This afternoon, Jared Leto is here with his band
30 Seconds to Mars, a rock group he fronts when not acting in films
like the upcoming Mark David Chapman biopic,
Chapter 27. The
band's appearance is interactive in the classic sense of that word
- Leto pulls a kid out of the crowd to thank him for being at every
show, and the band hugs and high-fives audience members. They even
give everyone a ticket to their concert the following night.
"Wow," says one excited girl as the studio empties out. "I guess
I'm not going home after school tomorrow either."
GROWING UP, we thought the world of MTV was so inaccessible,
and maybe that's why people were so desperate to be on it that they
started taking off their clothes whenever the cameras rolled
around. Watching Fuse, however, is a different thing. It's casual.
The stars seem relaxed. The kids joke around with them. It sort of
feels like someone's basement party. Fuse gives off the vibe that,
really, all the celebrity stuff is no big deal. It's music. We all
love it.
"We're like the cool older brother who introduces you to new
music," says Smith. "If MTV and VH1 are
the Beatles and the Rolling
Stones, then we're the Replacements."
Smith is also the host of
Steven's Untitled Rock Show, one
of the few high-visibility outlets remaining for that genre at a
time when rock radio is folding across the country. Smith is a
die-hard music fan in his late 20s who came to Fuse from VH1 ("back
when they actually played videos"), and it's fitting that he thinks
of the channel as a cool older brother, because it's exactly how he
acts. When I ask if the show brings out the adolescent in him, he
answers immediately, "It never left."
He characterizes the Fuse audience as "the outcasts, the kids in
the background of every yearbook photo," but as the channel
broadens its appeal and visibility, that description may be
changing. The kids in the studio at the Franz Ferdinand performance
and at
Daily Download don't particularly seem like freaks
and geeks. They seem like, well, kids. Fuse may have begun as the
anti-MTV, but at this point, they might as well call themselves the
anti-WB. The stations share an audience, yes, but they don't do the
same thing. "MTV is a lifestyle channel," says Pereyra, who also
hosts
Hip-Hop Confidential. "They're good at that. But what
we do is different."
"There's no antiestablishment voice at MTV," says Mullen. "They
are the establishment. Our audience is very sophisticated
about that stuff."
There is something of a community-access vibe at Fuse, although
you wouldn't know that from the roster of names who have stopped
by, including
Gwen Stefani,
Kanye West, Green Day, Coldplay,
Eminem, and My Chemical Romance. Another Fuse show,
7th Avenue
Drop, has hosted the Strokes, Foo Fighters, and Fall Out Boy.
Other Fuse shows include
d'Fused, a music-documentary
series, and
Empire Square, a
South Park-type cartoon
about a band of young musicians, created by former EMI UK
executives Anthony Cauchi and Lloyd Salmons and ex-Blur drummer
Dave Rowntree. But at its heart, Fuse is a fan's channel, the
television equivalent of liner notes and box sets. It has all the
little extras - the videos, the interviews, the commentary, the
behind-the-scenes footage - the things you don't have to have but,
man, do you really want.
Right now, Fuse is in 44 million homes, thanks in no small part to its parent company, Cablevision. But it still lacks name recognition, which is why the talking sign recently went up. Already kids are starting to notice, standing outside and peering in, listening to the music being broadcast onto the street. And Fuse has at least one new fan. As my cabbie pulled up to the curb, he stared up at the sign. “Hey, that didn’t use to be there,” he said. “I like it.”
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