Opinion

MTV: The art of self-importance

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If you are anything like me, and I bet you aren’t, you’ve spent a considerable amount of your holiday breaks in Mexico, Missouri. No, I didn’t attend the world-famous Mexico Military Academy — none of my behavioral disorders has been diagnosed, so I dodged the bullet there.

However, my grandmother lives in the ever-so-small city, so to Mexico we go every Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Arbor Day (my grandfather was a park ranger).

As you very well may have guessed, Mexico is not the same bustling center of culture and activity as its namesake to the south. In fact, the biggest attraction in town is a soybean processing plant. And after you’ve tried six flavors of soymilk, even the plant tour gets old.

So when I go to Mexico for a holiday weekend, I rekindle my passionate love affair with cable television. As a child, mummy and papa refused to get cable at home, so whenever I had access, I treated cable TV like Delta Burke treats chocolate cake. This Thanksgiving was no exception.

On Saturday, wallowing in my newfound post-Thanksgiving corpulence, I turned on the television and headed straight for my old favorite, MTV. Now, I don’t purport to have been completely cut off from MTV, but I haven’t seen as much of it in the past few years as I used to, so I was a little surprised by the content.

The first program I witnessed was titled “Total Disclosure: Carson Daly.” In it, dreamboat Carson told me all about his exciting life as the host of “Total Request Live.” I was surprised to learn, as I’m sure you will be, that TRL was actually the synthetic combination of two other Daly vehicles — “Carson Daly Live” and “Total Request”. Pure genius. And guess what else? It was Carson’s idea to combine the two! Something in my pants is telling me that I’m in love.

But seriously, what I found interesting about the program was that Carson spent little time talking about interesting people he had met, or how lucky he was to have gotten his job — instead, he talked about what a profound impact TRL has had on popular culture and how great the producers at MTV were.

Admittedly, I’m not in TRL’s target demographic, but I find it more than a little difficult to believe that TRL has had such a lofty influence on America as we know it.

And the self-promotion didn’t end there. A few hours later, a show about the greatest moments in MTV Movie Awards history was on.

Oh, nelly.

If there is anything worse than listening to jaded, washed-up, thirty-something, ex-MTV production assistants talking about how amazing it was in ‘95 when Jim Carrey made a silly face during his presentation of the “Best Kiss” award, I haven’t found it:

“So, we were all sitting around backstage, and Carrey hadn’t shown up, so, like, I looked at Tina, the director, and said, ‘Tina, what are we going to do? Jim isn’t here yet?’ And just as I said it, Jim came out of the bathroom and said, ‘Do not go in there!’ And then he went onstage and shot me this silly smile and I just could NOT believe it! Oh my god. It was so funny. Seriously. Really funny.”

(That was a made-up example, by the by).

OK, it must have been fun to have a job where you got to meet famous people, but you don’t see shows on NBC where Stone Phillips’ make-up guy talks about the night Stone did the story on teen literacy and the TelePrompTer stopped working. Although, I must admit that would be interesting …

Anyway, later in the show, Kurt Loder interviewed Chris Connelly (or was it the other way around?) about his favorite MTVMA memories. These guys have the same job. Why are they interviewing each other about the greatness of that job? Seems a bit grandiose to me.

I don’t know when or why it happened, but it seems that the most important thing in MTV’s universe is … MTV. There are fewer and fewer videos shown, fewer and fewer artists whose videos get on the air and more and more shows about MTV and its unchallengeable greatness. Sooner or later, people are bound to realize that MTV is not the say-all, end-all of American culture, and they will demand that the station return to its roots as a vehicle for musicians. Or maybe teenage girls will see to it that the MTV releases a series of “Best Moments of Backstreet Boys MTV Appearances” shows.

What is up with teenage girls anyway? Why don’t they just go through puberty and figure it out?

Jay Senter is a senior majoring in marketing.