Remember that song by Dire Straits where singer Mark Knopfler exclaims his desire for MTV several times during the song “Money for Nothing” ?

Well, if he wants it, he can have it. Frankly, no one else cares anymore. Granted, he did make this claim back in the 80s when the alleged “music” network was new, innovative and still cool – come to think of it, even Knopfler would probably be found changing the channel these days.

It’s no secret there is more music programming these days on ESPN than MTV, at least that’s the way it’s starting to seem. I can’t remember the last time I turned to channel 33 and didn’t see some snot-nosed tween complaining she couldn’t get Good Charlotte to play her 16th birthday and had to settle for New Found Glory.

So every year when it comes time to hand out the awards for best music videos, looking to MTV’s Video Music Awards for the best tunes seems as intelligent as looking to PETA for recommendations on where to get a good steak.

It’s not that I am some music elitist and simply hate the VMAs because they snubbed all my favorite bands’ videos and nominated a bunch of sexy pop stars instead. I hate them because all the sexy pop stars that got nominated are the ones I expected.

There’s no reason that the 20-something bands who go in and out of rotation on TRL should also be the bands that wind up being nominated for and winning all the awards. Keeping all the focus on the same bands is a shameful example of musical incest. This inbreeding is one of the reasons modern pop music is in such a grim state: When you keep all of the genes in the family, something is going to go wrong down the line. See also: Ashlee Simpson.

I’ll be dead long before I even begin to believe Usher should have even been considered for “Video of the Year” and I hope I am dead long before I have to suffer the indignity of seeing Lindsay Lohan walk home with a “Best Pop Video” award.

If MTV wants to pass itself off as a network that knows anything about music or music videos, it should probably have had more than a handful of platinum and soon-to-be platinum bands on its list of award winners. Even the “MTV2 Award” which exists to credit a smaller band’s success was chalk full of bands even my mom knows about.

By the time you have read this, we will know the outcome of Sunday night’s, over-hyped, over-sexed musical blasphemy, but the problem extends far beyond this one year.

To those who care about music, seeing only three or four hardworking bands on the VMAs every year is a hard fact to deal with. Actually, now that I think about it, just watching the VMAs is a hard thing to do year in and year out.

Every year, each presenter shamelessly and continually plugs his or her next album, movie, sitcom or ridiculous career move, and add that to a handful of uninspired live performances and ton of bad jokes capped off with some sort of “pushing-the-boundaries” stunt they try to pull to shock crowds.

Not that this will change a thing, and the truth is, why would they change? Even the people who hate these damn things end up watching them as well as all of the network’s other non-musical shows.

So until they decide to changes things up there’s not much to do except complain and see who LC hooks up with next on “Laguna Beach.”