While many people clearly loved the show (the production even spawned a board game of the same name), VH1’s notoriously rude pop-ups were not without their controversies. After all, many of the notes were a little cheeky.
In an interview with Billboard, producers Tad Low and Woody Thompson revealed that they had to fight quite hard with VH1 over what they were allowed to say about certain musicians. To source their gossip, the showrunners obtained crew lists from music productions and interviewed workers for their amusing stories. For a time, when they weren’t allowed to run a certain story, they would hide text in the show, making the info appear for a split second in the credits for intrepid fans to find. “The business, at the time, was pre-TMZ, the media outlets and the press reps for the artists had a very cozy relationship,” Low remarked. “There are definitely people at VH1 who treated artists sort of reverentially, like gods — God forbid you say anything bad about Bruce Springsteen, you know?”
And their comments did sometimes get them into trouble. On one occasion Meat Loaf complained that the show had made fat jokes about him, and the pop-up created for Billy Joel’s “Keeping the Faith” allegedly drove Joel into such a rage it had to be canceled (per Spin the Bottle). The troublesome team was eventually booted from the VH1 building, and in 2002 — fueled by a dip in interest in music videos — the company felt that the show had run long enough and finally pulled it (via The New York Times).
