The channel’s main content is sit-down interviews, including one with Oasis member Noel Gallagher, as Bell Media wrestles with Canadian record labels over fair use rights for songs featured in some archival footage.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Handout – Bell Media
A deep library of MuchMusic’s celebrity interviews has found a new home on YouTube.
Bell Media says Much Rewind launched last week as the official public archive of pop culture moments that once aired on the nation’s music station.
So far, the collection is slim, with little more than a handful of interviews that include pop singer Christina Aguilera, rapper Missy Elliott and Eminem.
But MuchMusic head Dave Krikst expects that number to grow in the coming weeks with fresh uploads of old interviews each week.
“What it is, at the moment, is great interviews. What it will be, I think, is to be determined,” Krikst said Friday.
“What we wanted to do is start slow.”
Much Rewind arrives years after MuchMusic fans began calling for its media owner to dig into its vast treasure trove of footage, which includes 45,000 archival tapes, and rescue clips that have languished since Much effectively stopped operating as a music TV channel.
Since then, many viewers have uploaded copies of their grainy VHS tapes to YouTube and created a publicly sourced archive.
The official YouTube channel features digitized footage that often looks better than it did when it originally aired on MuchMusic.
Still up in the air is whether musical performances might appear in the archive.
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Bell Media has wrestled with Canadian record labels over fair use rights for songs featured in some of its archival footage, which is the main reason a documentary on MuchMusic was pulled from its Crave premiere last year and has yet to materialize.
Krikst said he hopes Much Rewind will eventually host footage of musicians who played live at MuchMusic’s Toronto studio. He said he’s presently in talks with Universal Music Canada to upload a performance by the Tragically Hip.
Until those details are ironed out, sit-down interviews are the main content.
Most of the archival footage appears raw and unedited, which is not usually how interviews aired on MuchMusic, where the conversations were edited and interspersed with music video clips.
The six uncensored interviews uploaded as of Friday involve chats between Much VJs and era-defining stars of the ’90s and ’00s.
Master T asks late R&B singer Aaliyah about making music with R. Kelly, who’s now serving prison time for sexually abusing girls and young women.
Bill Welychka settles down with the notoriously prickly Oasis brother Noel Gallagher for his foul-mouthed take on why the musician thinks Robbie Williams and the Spice Girls lack talent.
On the stranger side of the time capsules is Gwen Stefani’s conversation about her debut album “Love. Angel. Music. Baby.” It unfolds as the No Doubt singer is nestled on a couch surrounded by the Harajuku Girls, her backup dancers at the time, who are frozen in poses for the duration of the 40-minute interview.
“We wanted to get some of the great interviews, wild interviews and entertaining interviews up,” Krikst said.
He added that Much Rewind will aim to react to news events of the week as best it can. For instance, after rock star Ozzy Osbourne died on Tuesday, his team began looking into whether they could draw on his past MuchMusic interviews and post them in the coming days.
Ultimately, Krikst hopes Much Rewind becomes a reliable source for historic moments.
Shorter clips from some interviews will be posted Much Rewind’s Instagram and TikTok accounts, while Much’s current crop of VJs may also take a more active role in contextualizing some of the footage.
“I think some of that’s just going to be organic,” Krikst said.
“It’s important to me that current MuchMusic continues to push forward. And, in a parallel way, we now bring the iconic archives to a larger audience.”