MTV's Vice Guide to Everything: aka the death of Vice's street cred

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?




Vice Magazine started up in Montreal in 1994 by Shane Smith, Suroosh Alvi, and Gavin McInnes. The magazine then moved to New York City in 1999 and enjoyed a lot of success with its ironic, satiric perspective and columns like the scathing fashion Dos and Don’ts. Vice has branched out and now has their own record label, feature film, clothing line, dvd series, and a number of published books.


The 2010 Vice Magazine media kit humbly says, “Our stories are obsessed over by the coolest consumers in the Americas and around the world...Vice has a global army of fanatical readers who await each new issue as fervently as if it were bottled water in the desert or something.”


Over time the magazine’s status waned as the whole “sex, drugs, and rock n roll” thing lost its cool. MTV also faced big changes in trying to determine how the internet would play into the future of the network. The two brands joined forces when Viacom, MTV’s parent company, began funding vbs.tv, a site for Vice videos run by magazine co-founders Shane Smith and Suroosh Alvi along with Eddy Moretti and director Spike Jonze.


The relationship between the two companies was initially downplayed by Vice, which most likely wanted to maintain its image of authenticity. When Wired Magazine’s Jason Tanz asked Shane Smith in 2007 about Vice’s connection with MTV, Smith replied, "I don't even talk to them."


Vice Magazine isn’t the only one who has felt a need to spruce up the face of their brand. Due to lower ratings, in 2009 MTV made the decision to run inspiring stories alongside their escapist shows. Tim Arango wrote in the New York Times that, “After years of celebrating wealth, celebrity and the vapid excesses of youth, MTV is trying to gloss its escapist entertainment with a veneer of positive social messages.”


Stephen Friedman, MTV’s general manager told Arango, “It was very clear we were at one of those transformational moments, when this new generation of millennials were demanding a new MTV.” Friedman said that in the former era “the humour was more cynical, the idea of community seemed earnest and not cool. It’s the opposite now.” Friedman’s talk of earnestness is quite similar to Vice’s embrace of news, politics, fashion, art, and the environment.


The show itself is actually quite interesting to watch, I will admit that. The viewer sees things that are original and fascinating, and yes, there are topics that one would not likely see from the traditional media like jui jitsu fighters in Brazilian favealas or Ghanaian coffin-makers who build spaceships and beer bottles to bury their dead.


But even Shane Smith offered a caveat when he spoke with the National Post: “We’re not Jesus Christ, and if Vice is a news source, then people have to be worried because that’s not why we started. We’re not trying to save the world. But at the same time, we do go out in the world and we see that there are massive problems and our job as the media is to shed light on those problems.”


Each segment of the show features Shane Smith, Spike Jonze, Ryan Duffy or Thomas Morton investigating some issue that almost always involves danger. They feel that they’re doing something different from mainstream media because they immerse themselves in the subject that they are reporting on. "Traditional journalism always aspires to objectivity, and since day one with the magazine we never believed in that," Vice co-founder Suroosh Alvi told Wired Magazine. "Our ethos is subjectivity with real substantiation.”


In fact the vbs website tried to distance themselves from the some of the connotations of the Vice brand a little."We've grown up," Alvi said. "We're not just for 24-year-old skateboarders."


But after watching four episodes it’s clear that when it comes to Vice, it’s just more of the same old. Each topic examined is a refurbished version of their old sex drugs, and rock n roll ethos. Although they realised that a photograph of a naked woman lying in a pile of coke isn’t subversive anymore, they’ve done little to genuinely update or reinvigorate their old mentality to adapt to society’s shifting values. Despite the new facets, it’s still about guns, girls, drugs, and danger. Just by watching the trailer, you can see where their fascination lies.


The problem for Vice is that cool is only cool as long as it is inaccessible to the masses. Just as the American Apparel V-neck tee that Vice once advertised has lost its cachet now that preteens wear them cruising Markville mall, so too has the former hip authority succumb to this sad truth.


In a video posted by Vice on youtube, Alvi said, “The magazine has always existed kind of below the radar in America and we’re happy with that because we don’t want to change our content and become a mainstream company and put the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the cover so we can get to more [people]. That’s not us. We start doing that, it’s time to go home. Pack it up, call it a day.”

It might be time to start packing your bags.