VMA Madness

So yesterday I watched this retrospective on MTV’s Video Music Awards on MTV. Among other things, it featured a series of interviews with backstage personel who discussed difficult celebrities, power failure and the like. What was particularly bizarre was that the always-savvy MTV actually had backstage footage of these producers and PAs reacting to these incidents. This means that MTV, in addition to putting on the show and documenting everything that occurred in the front-of-house, actually filmed themselves backstage.

Take a moment to think about this. MTV, as Naomi Klein teaches us, is pure brand. They’re essentially productless—they’re just a medium for other people’s products. Those videos are hardly products in themselves…they’re advertisements for songs. Here was MTV documenting themselves putting on a show for a medium about another medium. Frankly, it’s enough to wreck your head.

Also featured in this retrospective was a brief red-carpet shot of Andy Warhol arriving for the VMAs, obviously some time between ’84 and ’87. This was, to me, the 20th and the 21st century colliding in a bizarre cosmic convergence. To me, Warhol is this great twentieth century painter who died a long time ago, while MTV is this totally new phenomenon that changed the way music was made. I found it odd to reconcile that the two could overlap.

In a less abstract vein, I was surprised to hear pop’s latest tie-wearing skater-tart Avril Lavigne thank Canada’s MuchMusic. But, then, it turns out according to her bio she was “bound to bust out of Napanee, Ontario, population 5,000”. Word up, eh.

We live in Ireland, and the VMAs verified what we have long suspected. We’re being deprived of a good portion of new music because of Europe’s obsession with bubble-gum pop. It’s a big depressing, but check out the top 5 singles this week in Ireland:

1. Like a Prayer – Mad’House
2. Round Round – Sugababes
3. Underneath Your Clothes – Shakira
4. A Thousand Miles – Vanessa Carlton
5. The Logical Song – Scooter

Oy, it’s enough to make a folk rock fan just fade away (eschewing burning out as too much work). That is, I suppose, with the exception of Shakira, whose music I was ready to despise. Then I actually heard Laundry Service and found it rather addictive. In addition to her fine ability to shake her thang, she’s actually pretty gifted and writes some truly surreal lyrics (I expect it’s a symptom of being translated from the Spanish).