TINY GEMS

This Sunday, the 10-year run of “TRL” (how long has it been since the show was actually called “Total Request Live”?) on MTV came to an end with the show’s 2247th episode. A New York Times article on the final episode details the performances (Beyoncé, P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake) and the Times Square spectacle (sign-waving, screaming teens corralled behind police barriers) that characterized the final episode, echoing the height of the show’s popularity – the late 1990s and early 2000s, when boy bands dominated the charts and drew herds of shrieking fans outside of MTV studios every afternoon.

Does the end of “TRL” – as Ben Sisario’s Times article hints – mean the end of the reign of the music video, the end of MTV’s hegemony over teen culture? Despite attempts to keep clips under control through DRM and take down notices, music videos and other proprietary content still vanish into the dark corners of the Internet, never to return safely to DMCA-controlled territory – opening up new channels and modes of viewing not available under the auspices of MTV producers. Watching “TRL” constrains the viewer’s access to content; sites like YouTube, however, offer a plethora of related videos, playlists, ads and fan-created content to be browsed at will, a wealth of media and information for the avid pop music fan. The linearity of “TRL” – a slow progression of video clips, guest appearances, performances, contests, news and commercials – pales in comparison.

In other words, in an age of web 2.0 media bombardment – with music videos posted to YouTube and imitated by fans or mashed with the pop-culture-phenomenon-of-the-week, with celebrity gaffes blogged about, discussed in Us Weekly and “The Soup” and then blogged again – the “TRL” format seems quaint, even endearing in its outdatedness. What need is there for new “TRL” appearances when fans have nearly the whole 2247-episode show catalog available at the click of a mouse, to be downloaded, remixed, parodied at will? While this increase in content access allows the target audience of “TRL” (teenage pop fans) greater agency in the production and consumption of culture, it may also decrease the ability of current music/video producers to create truly singular, original or interesting content. As the pop star is subsumed more and more into a field of public property, the music video and the pop single lose their capacity for innovation bit by bit; defining moments in these media risk being drowned out in the general babble.

Then again, with music videos like this one, who can say the age of the music video is over?