Cher with Beavis and Butt-Head, ‘I Got You Babe’: Beavis and Butt-Head Do The Charts

Cher with Beavis and Butt-Head
‘I Got You Babe’

Highest UK chart position
#35 on January 16, 1994

1. We need a chick who’s cool

The original plan for this essay was to talk about where Beavis and Butt-Head might be today, if they were real people. They were 14 when they first appeared in 1992, so they would be in their mid-40s now.

That makes them part of the middle-aged, white American working class, a group that has been speculated on a lot recently. In 2015, a study was published that claimed that non-college-educated American men aged 45-54 were dying at a much faster rate than expected rate. This spike in mortality had grim underlying causes, such as drug overdoses and suicide caused by their high rates of divorce and unemployment.

And so I went looking for the original report, because I believe in rigorous research, even when we’re talking about Beavis & Butt-Head. But I was not prepared for what I found.

You see, this study, entitled “Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century” was originally published in a journal called The Presentations of the National Academy of the Sciences, a venerable publication that first appeared in 1914.

And, for over 100 years, scientists have referred to The Presentations of the National Academy of the Sciences by the acronym…PNAS.

Huh.
Uh-huh huh.
Heh heh. Heh. Heh heh heh.
Huh huh. That magazine is called “PNAS”.

Some of the world’s finest minds have written and published in PNAS, and they’ve managed to stay focus without giggling. However, I am not one of the world’s finest minds. I’m part of the MTV Generation, I grew up watching Beavis and Butt-Head, and if you tell me there’s a journal called PNAS, you can rest assured that I’ll forget what I was talking about and spend three hours browsing their archives in search of the funniest cover.

(It’s this one…)

2. They say we’re young and we don’t know

MTV is such a simple idea that you could imagine Beavis & Butt-Head pitching it. What if radio was, like, on the TV and stuff? And what if it rocked?

The latter element of MTV’s strategy wasn’t accidental. The initial marketing plan was to focus on White Males aged 18-36, a lucrative advertising demographic. MTV’s early playlisting strategy focused on appeasing this group, which meant lots of guitars, lots of boobs, and no Black people.

By the mid-80s, MTV was a cultural juggernaut, with 25% of American teens watching on a daily basis. When 25% of teens agree on anything, it always leads to a moral panic, and the late 80s were dominated by conversations about “The MTV Generation”, a cohort of moronic, illiterate, thrill-seeking kids with an attention span of three seconds. MTV was seen as something of a Pied Piper figure, enchanting the nation’s children and leading them off to oblivion.

But in the early 90s, something happened that shook up the entire music industry and challenged MTV’s identity.

The whole industry, including MTV, relied on the Billboard Hot 100 as a barometer of public taste. However, the Hot 100 was a shambles, and mostly based on vibes. Billboard staffers would phone up record stores, ask them to rank their recent record sales, and then try to compile a chart that reflected what they were hearing. This system was unreliable and extremely easy to manipulate.

In 1991, Billboard switched to Soundscan, which took live data directly from barcode scanners in around 4,000 stores nationwide. This system was faster, more accurate, and much harder to manipulate. For the first time ever, the industry had an accurate picture of what people were actually listening to.

And it turned out that music audiences were a lot weirder than anyone had guessed. Tastemakers had previously dismissed genres like country, hip-hop and heavy metal, but in reality these records were selling in enormous quantities. Suddenly, the album charts were dominated by acts that had been ignored under the old system: Garth Brooks’ Ropin’ The Wind, NWA’s N*ggaz4Life and Metallica’s Metallica all were Number One albums in 1991. When Nevermind deposed Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at the top of the album charts, Billboard themselves called it “an astonishing palace coup”.

Going into 1992, MTV was at something of a crossroads. Tastes were evolving, the charts were chaotic, and their role as music’s dominant tastemakers was under threat. On top of all that, their audience now consisted of teenagers who had grown up watching MTV. Non-stop music videos weren’t a novelty for them anymore.

MTV would have to evolve.

3. You got me and Butt-Head, I got you

MTV Productions launched in 1991 with the mission to create original content and break up the endless stream of music videos.

Liquid Television, the first MTV Productions project, was a showcase of animated shorts by independent artists who were given free rein to create whatever they wanted. This chaotic showcase was loosely tied together with regular features like Aeon Flux and Stick Figure Theatre.

Season 2 of Liquid Television opened with “Frog Baseball” by Mike Judge, a former engineer who had only learned to animate a couple of years previously. The short featured two characters based on various kids he’d known over the years, including childhood friends and various school bullies. Their personalities came from a kid that Judge had met in college:

When I was in college a twelve-year-old kid next door called himself Iron Butt. They all called him Iron Butt because supposedly you could kick him in the butt as hard as you wanted and it wouldn’t hurt him. He’d demonstrate this. He’d stick his butt out and kids would line up and just whack! kick him in the butt and he’d say, “See, it doesn’t hurt.”

He had a single mother and she was just never around, and he’d be at our house, he’d sneak into our house, he’d be in the backyard, he actually burned down the tree in front of the house once. He was just a maniac and his parents weren’t around.

“Frog Baseball” is a comedy, but it also works as horror. There’s something vaguely terrifying about the main characters. They’re malevolent, irrational, prone to extreme violence, uninterested in everything other than boobs and guitars. They’re monstrous in the way that only teenage boys can be.

They are, essentially, the children of MTV.

Judge was commissioned to build a series around these idiots. Beavis and Butt-Head was born.

4. When I’m sad, you’re a clown

Beavis and Butt-Head generated a predictable level of outrage, with one Senator alerting the world to the menace of “Beaver and Buffcoat“.

The duo were accused of inspiring a spate of copycat violence, including a five-year-old boy who burned down his family home. It turned out that the boy in question had never seen Beavis & Butt-Head, but that was enough for MTV to move the show to a post-watershed slot and add a warning:

Nevertheless, the duo became a sensation and MTV’s most-watched show. They also began to directly impact the music industry, thanks to their regular musical interludes, which featured the boys talking about random videos.

Mike Judge, who improvised most of the music segments while watching the videos, took this approach to his commentary:

“When the show was starting, I thought, ‘Well, if Beavis and Butt-head like something, maybe that’s an insult to the band.’ Then I decided, even though they’re really stupid, they have primal good taste.”

That taste was binary, with all things divided into “rocks” and “sucks”. However, there was no guessable logic to what they would endorse. PJ Harvey’s ‘50ft Queenie‘ was declared noisy and cool; Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Breaking The Girl’ prompted Butt-Head to observe that “sometimes cool bands have to make wussy songs to get chicks”.

Beavis and Butt-Head became the world’s most famous music critics, the Siskel and Ebert of rock’n’roll with the power to transform a band’s fortunes. Rob Zombie credits them with saving his career, Gwar, Primus and Babes In Toyland all got a Beavis & Butt-Head bump, and Winger were pretty much bullied out of the music industry.

The music industry had never really experienced anything like this before. Beavis and Butt-Head had the chaotic, up-yours energy of a DIY punk fanzine, but it was one of the biggest shows in the world. How does your marketing team respond to that? You can’t schmooze cartoon characters the same way you’d schmooze journalists or DJs. How do you ensure your records get a positive review?

The answer is: you can’t. The same way you can’t control the charts as easily in a post-Soundscan era.

What you can do—and this will be an increasingly dominant trend in the rest of the 90s—is just pump out as much stuff as possible and see what sticks. Record releases soared in the 90s, with an estimated 35,000 new LPs hitting stores each year. Bands started getting signed, hyped and dropped at head-spinning speed as labels searched desperately for records that would connect with the new audiences revealed by Soundscan.

Essentially, everyone was hunting for the next band that would make Beavis and Butt-Head say, “huh huh, this is cool”. The children raised on MTV were now in control, and they would be for the rest of the 90s.

5. Before it’s earned, our money’s all been spent

Beavis and Butt-Head left MTV in 1997, and actually faded quite quickly from the public consciousness despite several attempted reboots. Zoomers don’t coI think they’re very of their time. You just had to be there, or else you just won’t get it.

(Uh huh huh huh. You said “get it”.)

But their legacy lives on in YouTube, which is dominated by reaction and commentary channels—essentially, people watching TV and saying “this rocks” or “this sucks”.

MTV itself has largely been reduced to this. They started playing fewer and fewer videos over the 90s, and by 2000 they were playing only eight hours per day. By 2008, this dropped to less than three hours.

Finally, in 2010, they officially dropped “Music Television” from their logo. MTV became 100% devoted to trashy reality shows aimed a younger audience, with occasional forays into scripted drama (like the spin-off of Teen Wolf) and movies (like the 2011 remake of Footloose).

Even that ambition has been pared back recently. These days, the original MTV channel on US cable is dominated by a single show, Ridiculousness. And I do mean dominated. Here’s this week’s MTV schedule with Ridiculousness in orange:

Ridiculousness is bottom-of-the-barrel TV. It’s essentially America’s Funniest Home Movies, but with viral internet clips. A very annoying host offers commentary, while two people on a couch laugh along and say, “huh huh, that was cool”.

Yeah, it’s the Beavis and Butt-Head formula, but stripped of all its charm and personality. A sad fate for a TV network that was once so powerful that it could convince Cher to duet with two cartoon dirtbags.

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