{"id":2446434,"date":"2019-07-17T08:59:34","date_gmt":"2019-07-17T14:59:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=859645"},"modified":"2019-07-17T08:59:34","modified_gmt":"2019-07-17T14:59:34","slug":"besides-nostalgia-what-can-diddys-making-the-band-offer-musicians-in-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/music-news\/besides-nostalgia-what-can-diddys-making-the-band-offer-musicians-in-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Besides Nostalgia, What Can Diddy\u2019s \u2018Making The Band\u2019 Offer Musicians in 2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nearly 20 years ago, Making The Band<\/a><\/em> presented a model of the music industry\u2019s dystopian future. The entire concept was in the title \u2014 throw a group of random, desperate and wide-eyed musicians from across the nation together, and force them to coalesce into something marketable \u2014 until Diddy<\/a> envisioned something more powerful and everlasting. In quick succession, the world received Da Band, Day26, and Danity Kane. Now Diddy and MTV are reviving<\/a> the concept in another effort to sell consumers\u2019 childhoods back to them.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved it. It was one of the happiest times of my life,\u201d Diddy said in a video announcing the series return on Instagram<\/a>. \u201cYou can\u2019t recreate happiness. No sleeping in the trophy room. You have to do new things and change the game.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Making The Band 2<\/em>, Diddy was the architect of a hilariously Machiavellian show that inadvertently taught a generation three distinct lessons. Unfettered access to the daily lives of musicians was a marketing strategy that would prove bluntly effective, the quality of the music was second to the entertainment value of the artist\u2019s creating it, and hip-hop<\/a>\/R&B\u2019s futures would come from their propensity to produce endless narratives for fans to follow along with. Ironically, it\u2019s those same ideals that make the recently announced revival of Making The Band<\/em> seem like a futile exercise. It\u2019s propping up a type of linear, televised storytelling that\u2019s far too slow to keep up with the way audiences consume musician\u2019s work now.<\/p>\n

Pop music subsists on speed. Social media has conditioned a generation of artists to commit their lives to constant scrutiny by documenting every aspect of it \u2014 if they\u2019re lucky, it feeds into their fame. Regular Instagram Live updates and impassioned tweetstorms are the norms. TikTok fueled virality and Tweetdeck-born disruptors can mint stars faster than labels know how to sign them. In this landscape, a 2020s Making The Band<\/em> isn\u2019t competing with other reality shows, or even other networks. Instead, their biggest threats are artists more concerned with follower counts and stan armies than the faceless households that prop up Viacom\u2019s Nielsen numbers.<\/p>\n

The lasting impact of Da Band, Day26, and Danity Kane has very little to do with the music they made. A classic Dave Chappelle sketch<\/a>, an R&B sing-off styled as a rap battle, and a member\u2019s alleged affair with Donald Trump Jr.<\/a> has more cultural impact than a song like Da Band\u2019s \u201cBad Boy This Bad Boy That\u201d<\/a> or Danity Kane\u2019s \u201cDamaged.\u201d<\/a> The type of absurdity that inspired Diddy to make his artists travel to Junior\u2019s for a slice of cheesecake seems pedestrian when teenage rappers are getting face tattoos documented in their IG Stories. The Kardashians are among the most powerful families in all of America, Cardi B leveraged her Love & Hip-Hop<\/em> fame into a historic rap career, and Donald Trump is the President. Making The Band<\/em>, along with a generation of reality shows, taught viewers that celebrity was the new power, but it likely doesn\u2019t have any new lessons to impart.<\/p>\n

Making The Band<\/em> was before its time \u2014 it belongs, though, to an influential era that\u2019s never coming back. Its central concept is no longer an outlier. That won\u2019t stop thousands of hopefuls from making it onto the show; Making The Band<\/em> might not make you a musical star, but it\u2019s one step closer to celebrity. That\u2019s all that ever really mattered.<\/p>\n