Earlier this month, Americans — and the world in general — lost a good friend and a great companion. This friend of so many officially died at the tender age of 27. MTV, or Music Television as it used to be known, leaves a void that cannot be filled easily and will be missed terribly.

What does it mean to have MTV die? After all, it is still on the air and running programs 24/7. MTV died because it now airs no shows dedicated strictly to music, which is how the station originally started. I know many of you may think that MTV has been dead for a while, but frankly it has been holding on in some vegetative state for the last decade or so.

Well, the cord was officially pulled on Nov. 13, 2008. The final episode of “Total Request Live” aired and ended an era in which MTV actually played music.

Although “TRL” was about as interesting as a dead moth and MTV had basically been finished playing music for a while, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and it still is a little bit sad. Now the question is, who exactly killed MTV?

MTV used to be seen as the thing that was going to ruin our society. It used to have attitude and was fun to watch. It had its best years when it was playing music or airing shows that still had musical influences. For example, “Beavis and Butthead,” the epitome of an MTV show in its prime, always showed music videos and was still very music centered. Now, however, what was once Music Television only has music in the form of “The Fray” lightly playing in the background while L.C. has the serious dilemma of choosing whether to drive her gold-plated Ferrari or her silver-plated one (either one goes well with her Uggs). MTV has slowly lost its attitude over the years and has become less of the counterculture thing that it once was, which leads us to our first suspect in who killed MTV — and that is Kurt Cobain.

Cobain and Nirvana were the vanguards of the Generation X movement, which was all about the attitude and being dirty. After Cobain’s death in April 1994, you can actually see a shift in MTV’s programming from the “all about the music” aspect to more about entertaining America’s youth. Shows such as “The Real World” and “Road Rules” popped up shortly after Cobain died.

When I started writing this piece I assumed that I could easily trace the demise of MTV from Cobain’s death, but I came across a different truth nugget than I expected. The only significant things that came from Cobain’s death is that showering became more mainstream and the flannel industry took a major hit.

See, we are actually the ones holding the smoking gun pointed right at our good friend. MTV is nothing more than a reflection of popular culture, which is decided, of course, by us. We killed MTV by just not being that interested in what it originally stood for by allowing ourselves to be more interested in things like “Date My Mom” as opposed to just music videos. That said, some of you might not even consider MTV dead. You don’t mind watching these “real” situation shows about model searches, hopeless people trying to get dates, and whether Audrina will find true love. That is fair, and if you like and watch those shows, more power to you. I am just disappointed that they have to be on a station that was originally designed to bring America music.

If we ever want to bring MTV back from the dead, we are just going have to demand more music on the station.

We don’t even have to start with good music — baby steps first. If that does not work, the world will still go on. After all, we do still have iPods and other sources to get our music.  

RIP Music Television (MTV): August 1st, 1981, to November 13th, 2008.