A Quote by Tom Green
When I started my show, it was a public access show in Canada, and I was a broadcasting student in the early '90s, years before I was on MTV. We were kids sort of experimenting and trying to take on the system - you know, the media machine.
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All of my old videos and the things I did on MTV, my old public access show - it was sort of all made for the Web, even though they were made before the Internet was broadcasting video.
When I was a television broadcasting student in 1993 up in Ottawa, Canada, and my friends and I started making a show, I consciously set out to apply comedy to technology. I started tomgreen.com back in 1994, and we weren't able to put video on there yet, but we were aware that that was coming.
I was a crazy Pee-wee Herman fan when I was in my early teens. Before he had the kids' TV show, he had a nightclub show in L.A., and I had gotten a VHS copy of it. It was a kids' show, but onstage in a bar, so it's sort of poking fun at the kids' show. And I was obsessed with that, and then 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure.'
I used to do stand-up when I was in high school. But I was also making beats for this rap group, and when we got a record deal, I sort of stopped doing the comedy and focused on the music instead. When that ended, I decided to go back to school, take broadcasting, and start my show on public-access TV.
Certainly when I was a kid, in the early '90s, men couldn't show weakness. It was very much a case of suppressing pain and getting on with it. I remember when I was six years old, I was playing football with kids who were three years older when, one day, I fell over and began to cry. And my dad was like, 'Don't ever let someone see you cry.'
We hoped to get a TV show, and we almost did, but 'The State' beat us out for this MTV show. So because they were there, and 'SNL' and 'Kids in the Hall' were there, we thought, 'Let's go try to do what Python did, and instead, let's make movies.'
The thing to keep in mind is that's how I started long before MTV and Twitter and Facebook. I studied at broadcasting school so I could learn how to shoot and edit videos, and tried to create my own television show so we could see through these wacky visions we had of funny bits we wanted to shoot.
I wanna thank MTV and the VMAs for choosing me to be a part of the show because, on this show, if you not an icon or upcomin' icon, you're not on the show, you know?
If it's a situation in which the public is being given access, you can't discriminate against the media and say, as a general matter, that the media don't have access, because their access rights, of course, correspond with those of the public.
This was early '90s and in New York hip-hop was coming on really strong; that was the sort of urban folk music that was almost threatening to eclipse rock music and indie rock music in terms of popularity, which it has certainly gone on to do. But you know, this is the end of the 1980s, beginning of the '90s. The whole independent label thing has really evolved to this incredible point from the early '80s when we started, and there wasn't one record label at all, until a couple people started forming these small labels.
In the case of the Web, each of us has slightly more access to a mass audience - a few more people slide through the door - but Facebook is finally a crude, personal multimedia conglomerate machine, personal nation-state machine, reality-show machine. New gadgets alter social patterns, new media eclipse old ones, but the pyramid never goes away.
People are gonna think that MTV censored me, and they really didn't. I really wanted to try to make a show that didn't rely on offensive, edgy material because I think it was an exercise in trying to write without that. Because I see that as a crutch sometimes and I want to know that I can do something funny and worthwhile without that. And also make a show that my parents would like and that kids could watch with their parents.
I tried out for another show while I was in college so I could pay off my student loans, and it sort of led to The Real World. The same people that were casting that show were casting The Real World, so they asked me to do it.
Take every job. Learn everybody's name. Show up early. Know who you are and know who you're not. Stop dreaming and start trying.
I started trading around 1979, fresh out of college. In the early '90s, I started guesting for major news media.
When I came to Nashville, I was sort of experimenting with a new identity, experimenting with the country world and country writers. I realized I needed to take a step back from that, to be true to some of the music I've been doing over the years and to put that into the world before I move forward and redefine myself again.
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