Occasionally, you’ll find this blog berating dance music press journalists and writers for refusing to ask difficult questions of DJs and those more generally in the scene. Aside from potentially providing a very insightful view into a topic, doing so can also result in an engaging interview for the publication.

To be fair, however, it’s not entirely the fault of journalists. A lot of it has to do with the lack of amusing people in the dance music world today. The harsh truth is that many of the top DJs in the world have nothing remotely interesting to say about anything. They either have no life experience and spend their entire time working – or they try to hide their pasts and therefore have nothing to say.

So when the emails went around from Nervous Records offering interviews with boss Michael Weiss, it’s little wonder so many of the dance music press jumped to it. Because as controversial as he is, he does understand the press needs interviews to be interesting and reveal things the reader didn’t previously know. And in DJ Mag, he reveals quite an astonishing fact.

In 1993, MTV had a smash hit on their hands in the form of Beavis and Butt-Head. They were looking for more shows, and Nervous were in the pipeline. According to Weiss…

“I was in talks with MTV about doing a cartoon, right after Beavis & Butthead had blown up. They were looking for something more urban… They were going to call him Neil Nervous, and it was going to be a hip-hop cartoon – but they were just offering a one-time buyout, no residuals. It was a decent sum, but as a lawyer, I couldn’t live with myself if it had become big.” 

So because MTV didn’t put enough money on the table, the deal fell through. It’s unclear exactly what Weiss means by “residuals”, but a solicitor advises me it often means sharing in the proceeds – in other words, if this show became big and MTV made a large profit out of it, Nervous would be entitled to a share of that profit.

Sadly, the cartoon remains a figment of the imagination to this day…