Whereas MTV used to use music and the image of its makers to sell a lifestyle (and, by extension, ad space), it now uses a lifestyle to sell music (in addition to the ad space). Songs are now just an add-on to crisply filmed images of young, attractive, sarcastic people who live in Brooklyn and do Brooklyn Things (showing up to a media job late every day, hanging out in bodegas).
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MTV’s shift from playing full-song videos to having background-music snippets accompanied by “Now Playing” crawls began several years ago, but it seems to have reached its obvious height on Pants, where a “music blogger type” has wild sex with a hot quirky girl “in [his] fucking refrigerator!” as someone who the protagonist might describe as “a less abrasive Cat Power” plays in the background. This emphasis on performing the role of “someone who’s into music” as opposed to actually listening to music (or watching a music video) is at the core of not only Pants and MTV’s 21st-century programming strategy, but of “music appreciation culture” (blogs, social media, party photographers’ galleries from secret shows like the aforementioned Wavves gig) as well. When Jason exclaims, “What a fantastic email this is going to make tomorrow!” as he heads toward home with a girl who’s got her backside in the air and her frontside in the fridge, he might as well be live-tweeting a concert—he’s simultaneously in the moment and removed from it, wondering how his descriptions of it after the fact will reflect on his profile, unconsciously keeping himself from being completely immersed in the fun he’s having.