Creator Mike Judge brought them along at just the right time. Five years before would have been too early. Five years later and nobody would have cared.
In 1992 when Beavis and Butthead first showed up on Liquid Television, MTV was a decade old. Personally I learned about and experienced music through MTV, not the radio, and my sense of what was hit wasn't through 95.5 WPLJ, But Dial MTV. In 1992 the music video was established and it was important. And it was going down hill.
Just look at this pretentious piece of crap:
Here's another one:
At first a lot of people thought Beavis and Butthead were 22 minute insult to heavy metal. After all they're decks out in AC/DC and Metallica T-shirts. But this was just background. Metal was the music of the white working class, and Judge was trying to tell us this from where his animated video critics hailed. He gives a few other hints. Once Beavis starts yelling at a plant and it becomes clear he's repeating a tongue lashing he got form his mom, 'How can you do this, after everything I've done for you!?' In another instance Butthead hilariously says, 'I'll have to ask my mom's boyfriend'.
Through Beavis and Butthead Mike judge pilloried what was happening to the genre. This usually took on two forms. One, this pair of morons was utterly baffled by what they were seeing because it was incomprehensible. Or, the video presented was so sodden with 'edge' and 'art' that Beavis and Butthead 'got it' and would riff on the video in a way that made absolutely no sense, just like the video.
Now I'm not going to show examples, at least not here. That would a a research project, really.
Maybe another post.
You know who else liked music videos? Jake Bloom in A Line through the Desert.
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