Justin Timberlake to the Rescue!

Okay, I know I caught your attention with the headline, so allow me to explain. Having written a particularly pessimistic entry yesterday about how we cannot believe anything we hear or see anymore, my spirits needed a boost, and frankly, this blog needed an entry like I did during the good old days when all I ranted about was how dumb pop culture was. Sure enough, last night was the MTV Video Music Awards, a treasure trove of opportunity if ever there was one. How can I not respond to what I saw? If you know me, you know that would be like not breathing. There was also the fact that this show was a "one-time only" thing (as they kept mentioning throughout the show), so they could get the biggest audience possible; however, long-time VMA viewers like myself are so used to the idea that they'll replay the thing 30-some-odd times that I'm sure most of you who intended to watch the show last night missed it. Therefore, I need to tell you what you missed...

Particularly, how can I not join the chorus of entertainment reporters who are responding en masse to the "spectacle" that was Britney Spears' opening performance? All I have to say is that time and events really do change your perception of a person. Whereas a performance like this 6-7 years ago would have been quite hot and, well, typical of her and the trend of pop music, last night I found it... repulsive. Like I needed to be hosed off after watching the thing just to get the filth off. She looks like a divorced mother of 2, like someone who should just stay in Vegas and do a lounge show cuz it's the only way she should get a gig now. Times have changed and so have we, and so has she, but she obviously doesn't realize it.

From here we went to Sarah Silverman doing a monologue, which would have been better served if she was actually the host of the VMAs. Alas, the VMAs have followed the trend of other awards shows by choosing to go sans host. The VMAs NEED a host. The host has always been one of the best parts of the show... and Sarah Silverman would have made a terrific host. Of course, there was the issue of the audience not being the typical Sarah Silverman audience. When you fill a room full of celebrities (nice touch with having them seated at tables, by the way, like in a Vegas lounge), these celebrities are "too nice" to laugh about their fellow celebrities... it's just bad PR, don'tcha know... unless you're Kid Rock or Tommy Lee but we'll get to them later... As such, Sarah did her usual routine, slamming celebrities left and right, and the audience reaction was muted to the point that you thought she was bombing even though she wasn't. If this was her typical audience, there would have been howls of laughter.

The first award given out was perhaps the dumbest idea for an award MTV has ever come up with. I can just see the meeting now: "Hey, let's give an award out to the most annoying song of the year! Only we'll call it the 'Monster Single Award'!" Yeah, I see right through that. And as it was for the most annoying song of the year, naturally Li'l Mama was nominated, but more people think "Umbrella" by Rihanna was the most annoying song of the year, so that won. She wound up winning Video of the Year as well, so she at least has an award to be proud of, rather than only being able to brag that she had the most annoying song of the year as judged by MTV.

From here, the show started to play out like a typical VMA show... in other words, with as little recognition of rock as possible. See, MTV believes that rock died when "Headbangers Ball" went off the air a decade or so ago, and it never came back. Now I know we saw the Foo Fighters perform, but really, the fact that they kept cutting to all these parties that were going on (of which the Foos were one) just made it seem like it was almost a bit rather than an actual performance. That being said... they did some very cool live "mash-ups" of sorts. The guy from Gnarls Barkley singing "Darling Nikki" instead of Dave Grohl was outstanding, and later Serge from System of a Down sang with the Foos as well. Later, Rihanna did "Shut Up and Drive", backed by Fall Out Boy... but that was at Fall Out Boy's party, not on stage. I frankly found it all too confusing. In my advancing age, I can't handle getting bounced from someone on stage to someone's party to someone performing with Mark Ronson and his horn section.

Speaking of a performance that actually did take place on the stage, Chris Brown's was really good. It started with someone dropping a quarter into a slot for a "puppet dance show", and the curtains opened up, and there was Chris Brown as Charlie Chaplin, of all people. The only problem I had with that is... does anyone in MTV's target audience even KNOW who Charlie Chaplin was? If not, shame on them, but I enjoyed it, and you gotta love anyone who has the guts to follow that with a spot-on recreation of Michael Jackson's "Motown 25" performance, if only for 30 seconds.

We thankfully were spared the endless plugs of past years' shows, as only Jamie Foxx did the annoying "yell out the name and release date of your album/movie every 10 seconds" routine, but Justin Timberlake ("the "Quadruple Threat" himself, as MTV crowned him) made perhaps the most salient point of the evening about how MTV does things. He finished his acceptance speech by pleading with MTV to show more videos and fewer dumb reality shows, something we ALL have been wanting for years. Then, as if to prove Mr. Timberlake's point, MTV cut to a promo for some new reality show that apparently stars a Maxim cover model and a houseful of lesbians (no, I am not kidding). Brilliant guy, Justin Timberlake, and you never thought you'd see me say THAT, did you?

As I've said in the past, the real (though unintentional) purpose of a VMAs show is to create a time capsule to feature many of the celebrities and artists of the moment who cease to be popular about 2 weeks after the show airs. For example, this year, we have Miss Teen South Carolina, she of the "Americans can't find their own country on a map because a lot of Americans don't have maps" comment. MTV trotted her out there to say... well, to be honest, I don't know what the hell she was plugging because frankly, she made more sense during the Miss Teen USA pageant. Scripted ditziness just doesn't work as well as real honest-to-god ditziness, apparently, like, such as.

Along those lines, you had Seth Rogen and friend plugging the "Best New Artist" award not in terms of who was going to win, but who was going to lose, because just like the Grammys, for every Puddle of Mudd, B2K, Kid Rock, or Papa Roach who doesn't win the Best New Artist, there's a Macy Gray, Natalie Imbruglia, or Jesus Jones who does win. Actually, the VMA Best New Artist is usually a better predictor of longevity than its Grammy counterpart. For example, the winners from 2001-2005: Alicia Keys, Avril Lavigne, 50 Cent, Maroon 5, and The Killers. Although in this year's case, I think Lily Allen and Carrie Underwood are likely to have longer careers than Gym Class Heroes. Eventually, they're gonna run out of obscure 1980s hits to recycle... Puffy did... or is that Puffy Diddy?

Speaking of Diddy, he did come up with one of the most memorable lines of the evening... right after the aforementioned Kid Rock walked up to his fellow former Mr. Pamela Anderson, the aforementioned Tommy Lee, and decked him. Kid got cited for assault for his troubles, and Diddy closed the show by using it as a perfect opportunity to proclaim, "Stop the violence in rock!" I for one appreciate the delicious irony...

...and then MTV replayed the "one time only" show... speaking of irony...

Don't Believe The Hype... or Anything...

I was probably going to write an entry about the response to the Petraeus report in a few days after it is released, but I guess I don't have to wait... because people have already responded. I don't get how you can respond to something that hasn't been released, but it's now possible in our current state of affairs. Senator Joe Biden (D-DE, and oh by the way, he's running for president) has pretty much declared the report dead on arrival for what the advance reports are saying about it. Of course, I have to wonder if he was going to be in favor of it regardless of what it said.

This is because in these past couple of weeks of pre-release "hype", there has been a concentrated effort to plant doubt in people's minds that the Petraeus report cannot be believed. It's the usual suspects at work (the 23% Crowd), saying that the report will actually be written by the White House and rubber-stamped by Petraeus, or that Petraeus wouldn't dare say anything that would contradict the president or else he'll be fired.

Unfortunately, this effort has succeeded, as the results of a Washington Post-ABC News poll suggest. Of course, since it's the Washington Post doing the poll, I ask you to consider the source. Anyway, apparently 55% of the respondents want all our troops out of Iraq by the spring. And 53% say the report will make things look better than they really are. Breaking down the numbers, just 23% of Democrats expect an honest report.

This is the point we've reached in America today. We cannot believe anything we are told. I'm guilty of it myself in just this entry alone... the Washington Post issues a poll, I and other Republicans immediately assume it's bogus because the Post has a "liberal bias" and well, they intentionally asked liberals. How can 1,002 people reflect the attitudes of the nation as a whole? I'm studying the process of surveying the public and doing research of this type, and this sample size is WAY too small to be effective, but that's not the point. It's the messenger that draws the response. If the New York Post did the same poll and got more favorable results to the Republicans, Democrats would howl because it's Rupert Murdoch's company so they're biased.

When it comes to anything coming from the government, people are inclined to believe that it favors the president. I don't think I'm way too off-base to propose that President Bush is the most hated president in American history. Whether you support him or not, you have to acknowledge the severe and almost irrational level of hate people have for the guy. As such, their ability to receive and interpret the news is colored by this hatred. Take, for example, the NIE report of a couple months ago, which I previously wrote about when it was first released. Bush-haters immediately claimed the NIE was just another ruse meant to fuel the continuing subversion of the people's rights and freedoms by the Bush administration. Just look at a sample from the readers of Rolling Stone (one of the first magazines to proclaim that we "lost" the war in Iraq).

Herein lies the problem that has resulted from a generation brought up by the original Vietnam-era peaceniks, the ones who said, "Question everything." Now people are pre-conditioned to not believe anything that comes from the government. I can't say these people have lost touch with reality, because it's possible that they never had contact with reality to begin with. But what about the rest of us? How did we get to this point? Was it the 2000 Election fiasco? Was it the impeachment of Clinton? Was it Hillary Clinton's first week in the White House, when she declared Republicans and the press the enemy and a designated scapegoat?

So now conservatives watch Fox News and liberals claim it's biased, and liberals read the New York Times and conservatives claim it's biased, and if that's not good enough, then the fringes go to Salon.com or NewsMax. There are plenty of academics who have tried to explain this stuff; I know this because I've been reading all of it for my classes, but it just seems today to be worse than ever. And more importantly, how do we fix this? How do you repair what is coming to be a blatant mistrust of our institutions, both government and the media? That's what I want to see somebody propose.

Of course, when that person does, we'll immediately try to discern his or her political affiliation and claim he's biased and not believable...

Labor Day 2007

Well, the summer of '07 has now officially come and gone, so I guess it's good to take stock of things. Labor Day, of course, is a time to reflect on the hard work and sacrifices made by the American worker. As a recent article shows, that hard work and sacrifice seems to be more the case than ever. We now lead the world in worker productivity. You know what I say to that? I say I don't want to see or hear about any more stories dealing with how many hours of productivity we lose because of NCAA Tournament office pools or Fantasy Football or any of that. We lead the world in productivity, we can afford to lose a couple million hours!

With summer in the books, we can also reflect on some of the things that happened in our country. Not anything of substance, mind you (I deal with enough of that in this blog), let's just skip the sublime and go right to the ridiculous. Like fashion trends. I used to rant at length in this blog's predecessor about how stupid styles of the past (ex. corduroy) just seem to get randomly recycled due to either sheer boredom on the part of marketing execs or by apparently throwing darts at a dartboard (which I guess you would do if you were bored). That's gotta be the only explanation I can think of for why people my age and younger are suddenly wearing those UGLY plaid shorts that your dad or grandfather used to wear. You know what I'm talking about, the shorts that he thought went well with black socks going up to his knees. The ones that made you feel embarrassed that you were his offspring. I have no idea how anyone could possibly think those look "cool" when that's all they remind me and many others of.

And then there was the "Most Annoying Song of the Summer", another past topic of mine from the old blog. The song that gets replayed ad nauseum, gets stuck in your head endlessly, and then finds its way into TV commercials so you literally can't get away from it. Thanks to the advent of cell phone ringtone ads that are on cable TV every 5 minutes, this is even more of a headache. And you can thank those ringtone ads for hammering my nominee for this summer's most annoying song home: "Lip Gloss" by Li'l Mama. Muting the TV doesn't work either, by the way. All I have to say to her is I DON'T CARE WHAT I KNOW 'BOUT YOU!

I do have to say that this summer was a nice one here in upstate New York. We didn't roast like the rest of the country apparently did, humidity was low for the most part. Most days you could actually go outside and do stuff and not feel dead on your feet after 20 minutes, so I guess we lucked out.

After all the hype and excitement about the summer movie season, I guess most of it paid off in the form of the first $4 billion summer at the theatres. Of course, most of that increase may have just come in the form of higher ticket prices, you never know. All I know is that unfortunately not much of that $4 billion came from my wallet. I did get to see "The Simpsons Movie", and I thought that was really good. Other movies will just have to wait until their DVD release, and the August movie I was most looking forward to, "Charlie Bartlett", has been pushed all the way back to a February 1st release. Maybe by then, I'll have the money to go see it...

Summer TV didn't offer much, as usual. The one show I was most psyched about, the U.S. version of "Creature Comforts", lasted a whopping three weeks before CBS pulled the plug. Apparently, "Wallace and Gromit"-styled humor doesn't play well to a mass audience; that's why it's always been more or less a cult phenomenon here. I also liked "Thank God You're Here", but I can never remember to watch it. Other than that, it's the usual "Big Brother" (which should have been canceled years ago), "So You Think You Can Dance", and one forgettable episode of "Anchorwoman." My TV of interest for the summer has been Mets games (of course), and also thanking MSG for the brilliant move of replaying Buffalo Sabres games from last season every Monday night, which not only keeps fan enthusiasm up despite the free agent losses of Chris Drury and Daniel Briere, but also enables us to think cool thoughts on particularly muggy Monday nights.

I also have disappeared into the classics a bit. Some of us who are fortunate enough to have digital cable have a channel called "American Life TV", which reruns classic TV shows at night (like TV Land, but a little more obscure). Monday nights, they rerun all the MTM classics: "Mary Tyler Moore" (of course), "WKRP in Cincinnati", "The Bob Newhart Show" and also "Newhart". All much better viewing than yet another warmed-over "All-Time Funniest Commercials" special, and probably also much better than "Cavemen" or "Carpooling", which ABC will force us to endure shortly in the new fall season.

But I'm getting ahead of myself and I don't want to reveal too much of the old "State of the Tube" address for when that time comes, so onward we go... What's up next for this country? Oh, that's right, the Petraeus report and more congressional debate over withdrawing from Iraq... Joy...