“While you’re striving to find the right road,
There’s one thing you should know,
What’s hip today, might become passé”

— Tower of Power

Last week at MTV’s Video Music Awards Outkast performed a medley of songs to close the show in Miami. Big Boi and Andre 3000 scurried through “Prototype,” “The Way You Move,” “Ghetto Musick” and “Hey Ya.” These are infectious songs that helped make Speakerboxxx/The Love Below a great album and serious hot sh-t … Last year.

One whole year has passed since Outkast’s snappy double album caught fire igniting sweaty first-week-of-school keg parties across the country. A whole year!

“And now, for the millionth time, play ‘Hey Ya,’ damn it,” Big Boi said at the show.

Andre 3000, who has said many times he gets bored easily, was not amused, or enthused. While mindlessly running through the words, he stared blankly offstage as if to say, “I can’t believe I’m signing this stupid song again.”

We could have expected as much from MTV. The real disaster at the MTV-produced 2004 Super Bowl Halftime show was Nelly performing “Hot in Herre” a whole year and a half after it hit, not Janet Jackson’s tit.

In fairness, Outkast had just won a bunch of MTV’s awards — thanks mostly to their inspired collaboration with video director Bryan Barber — maybe that was the thought behind the medley.

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran a story on its front page about the advance sale of designers’ seasonal lines. Fashion Week in New York was once a chance for department store buyers to get their first looks at the haute offerings for spring or fall. The hungry demand for the latest by consumers, however, has recently seen retailers buying 60 to 80 percent of its seasonal inventory before it is even displayed at runway shows.

I propose a rethinking of terms so we can better understand the staying power of popular culture. What is hip?

Let’s think about the hottest things going on in culture as if they were radioactive elements. Think, “Mase’s new CD is hot” like a hazardous materials manager would think, “That uranium fuel rod is hot.” The latest buzz cooling down is like nuclear waste cycling through a half-life in a cooling pool.

Somehow this would all be tied to the atomic weight of the culture piece. How fatty was that album when it first dropped? It will take longer to decompose. Outkast performing Speakerboxxx tunes on your show after a year is still a very tiny bit hot. Nellyville after almost two years has deteriorated to harmless levels. Fashion is so volatile buyers will do well to speedily transport the good from design house to department store.

Some of these cultural elements could take thousands of years to dissolve, like Bob Dylan songs or Alfred Hitchcock movies. Others could burn out in minutes, like Sisqo or Hilary Duff.

In this analogy, MTV could easily be Yucca Mountain — a poorly created dumping ground for disintegrating and aging material with potential for material to leak out, and god help us all if it does.

We are constantly exposed to bits of culture just as we are constantly exposed to very low levels of radiation. If we had a cultural Geiger counter, it would click slowly and steadily no matter where we were, because our culture surrounds us. But if we waved this instrument over a Harry Potter book it would click faster, and the readings from an Allen Ginsberg poem or James Joyce novel would be off the charts.

Staying on top of these cultural materials is no easy matter. It takes a dedicated group of players running around as frantic as Cold War secret agents to diffuse the hottest elements safely into the mainstream world. Just like working for “The Company,” being a member of this vanguard is not just a job — it is a lifestyle choice.

Being on the bandwagon is not so terrible. Nobody has the energy to be ahead of the curve all the time, and everybody is a bandwagon fan once in a while (even Andre, who should spend some time away from MTV if he wants to avert a core meltdown). So feel no shame if you’re LIVESTRONG bracelets have been backordered since June or you still have not heard the Grey Album. It might take a while to get to it, but it will be worth it, just like nuclear de-proliferation.