On Sunday night, the most wonderful thing happened. MTV’s Total Request Live aired its final installment,
sparing the world from another parade of pop tarts and turnips, rap beefs and country punks.
Are you there God? It’s us, Listening Post. We just want to say thank you. Thank you so very much.
"It’s a big loss, not having this as a platform to promote our music," 50 Cent remarked, spelling out Total Request Live‘s true contribution to pop culture over its decade-long run, according to the Associated Press. By saying that, he also spelled out who will benefit from the show’s demise: Those who wish celebrities like Britney Spears and 50 Cent never had a platform to hawk their wares.
Evidently, that’s a big crowd. After all, as we explained in our earlier rant on this issue, the show’s ratings peaked in 1999, after being on the air for only a year. That it took MTV so long to pull the plug shows that the artists on the channel might not have been worth the airtime in the first place. But their value for product placement across all corners of the media multiverse won out in the end.
Artists that showed up like 50 Cent for the Sunday night send-off included Beyonce, Kid Rock, Justin Timberlake, Fall Out Boy and worse. Eminem literally phoned it in, complaining that "I feel like they’re kinda tearin’ down my home." Evidently, he wasn’t worried enough to actually show up and stop it from happening. Kind of like Britney Spears, the show’s prize celebrity, who didn’t show up at all.
And so, we hope, it is the end of an era, although we know that it is not. After all, Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz is hosting TRL‘s replacement clone FNMTV, so the beating goes on. But we can smile and remember the good times that we turned off TRL, and ran for our lives in fear from Mariah Carey, Christina Aguilera, Backstreet Boys and the rest of the horde, hoping it was all just a bad dream.
Because now, it finally is.
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