When the show “The Vice Guide to Everything” premiered on MTV this fall, I was surprised and intrigued. What was a brand like Vice, the self-proclaimed authority on hip culture, doing on a network like MTV, which also features shows like “I Used to be Fat” and “Teen Mom”?
According to the intro of the show, when Vice Magazine started all they cared about was “sex, drugs, and rock n roll.” But, as time marched on, and trucker hats lost their street cred, it seems Vice has changed their ways: “As we traveled around the world, we got more into news, politics, fashion, art, the environment – basically everything,” the narrator proclaims.
The show started off as videos for the web-based channel vbs.tv (Vice broadcasting system) and is about maverick journalists exposing all the crazy things that mainstream media is supposedly afraid to talk about. The show “chronicle[s] the absurdity of the modern condition,” Shane Smith, a co-founder of the magazine and host of the show, told the National Post last month. “But a lot of the different pieces are sort of political in their own way,” he said.
So now the online viewer can watch these episodes, and learn about everything from Russian mobsters who produce television shows about their mobster antics to fashionable bulletproof clothing designers in Colombia, just one click away from seeing “The Hills’” Lauren Conrad tell Heidi Montag she wants to forgive her and forget her. In its infancy, the magazine meant something to an underground culture. But what has become of Vice, a brand that gained notoriety for satirizing the core values of the very network that now hosts its show?
