I Want My, I Want My, I Want My Music Television

Every week I watch good ol’ Bob Ross on my digital tier because the colors of the painting of more vivid and his afro is more pronounced. Now my digital tier in the 500’s is a mix of digital, which I can watch, and high definition channels which I can’t watch due to my lack of a HDTV. So asides from The Joy of Painting, which finally got mentioned on the third installment of I Love the 80’s even though I didn’t start watching it until the mid-90s, I rarely go into the upper reaches of my cable because it’s too complicated for my feeble mind to understand.

Then a couple weeks ago, I pulled up the TV Guide that’s built into my cable system after another soothing week of Bob Ross when I noticed a new channel that wasn’t a digital or HD version of another station. Right above the digital PBS channel was a new channel called The Tube, so I though I’d check it out and once I turned it on, the channel was showing a video of Oasis’ Champagne Supernova. I was taken aback because it had been a very long time since I saw a video in the middle of the day and even longer since I saw a good one. So I sat there as video after video came on, each one good as the previous and commercial free aside from the occasional Public Service Announcement and promos for the station.

Overall, the station seems like an adult contemporary radio station but will videos and a much bigger playlist. Aside from your regular variety of videos you would see on other “video” channels, they also have an extensive library of live video that they draw from too. The main drawback of the AC playlist though is that the Foo Fighters are about as hard that the rock gets and there is absolutely no rap on the station. But it does give airtime to new artist such as Anna Nalick and Tristan Prettyman, singers that have been overlooked by other music channels and radio like Ben Harper and Citizen Cope, and even alt-country acts such as Ryan Adams and Mindy Smith that get ignored by the mainstream and Nashville.

So if you grew up in the 80’s and 90’s and miss when MTV actually showed videos or even videos that you like, check your cable system to see if you already get The Tube. Or hope over to there website, http://www.thetubetv.com/ to see if you get it in your area.