Fab! Brill! Super! The MTV Europe Music Awards are coming to Dublin next week! Geri Halliwell's going to be presenting a prize! Whitney Houston will be singing a song (one of her lovely ballads I hope!). 5ive will be doing a dance! Hundreds of our favourite pop stars (and their entourages!) will be descending on the Point next Thursday night for the glittering! spectacular! awards ceremony. All the hotel rooms in the city have been booked out! And so have the restaurants! And the nightclubs! And we've had to import 100 extra stretch limousines from Britain to ferry the stars around town! Five hundred million people around the world will be watching the show live from Dublin! And we might get to meet Madonna!
Over the next five days there will be no hiding place from the many-tentacled media monster that is MTV. The massively popular global music station is parachuting in its entertainment shocktroopers to get us movin' on up and partyin' on down: there'll be street-side broadcasts, special "build-up" parties and bands playing left, right and centre. And Thursday night's pop extravaganza ceremony - "music's answer to the Oscars" will have the biggest audience of any programme ever broadcast from Ireland. "Pop", it's worth remembering, is short for popular.
It's the hottest ticket in town for a long while (and no, the Eurovision song contest doesn't count). There were 3,000 tickets to the show made available to the public last month on the MTV Europe network, and they were snapped up in 2.5 minutes. In between giving out gongs to "Best Male", "Best Female" and "Best Band", acts performing live at the show include Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, Puff Daddy, The Corrs, Marilyn Manson and Britney Spears. The guest presenters include Pierce Brosnan, Alicia Silverstone, Damon Albarn, Geri Halliwell, Iggy Pop and the Fun Lovin' Criminals. Tout tickets for the show are already changing hands for four-figure sums.
What distinguishes the MTV music awards from other music award ceremonies is that they can, and do, command the services of the entire music community. Even multi-million selling artists, who have no new product to promote and no need of the publicity, will make themselves available for an MTV award show. There will be no "no-shows" on Thursday night. If MTV say play, you say "for how long?"
The musicians need MTV more than the channel needs them. Because the 24-hour music station is screened in almost every country around the world (the exceptions being African countries - although it's working on it), the artists can use MTV as a global promotional tool for their singles and albums. Instead of trekking around the length and breadth of the US in a camper van, or spending weeks on end on a promotional tour of Scandinavia, bands can get the video for their latest single (which in turn will help sell the album) onto the MTV network and see it go around the world, hitting their target market (15- to 24-year-olds) at every turn. The other benefit is they are playing to a (generally) rapt audience of consumers, who are motivated enough to spend, spend, spend on pop music.
MTV first began broadcasting in the US (where else?) in 1981. It was an idea whose time had come: by the early 1980s popular music was a multi-billion-pound industry and survey after survey revealed that it was what most young people spent their leisure time and money on. With television being the most popular mass-medium instrument of choice, the connection was instantly made and MTV USA was born.
Within a year of operation, MTV had become the fastest-growing cable and satellite channel in the world. It represented an international institution of youth culture and was distinguished by its unique form of programming (music, music and more music), its innovative graphics, quick edits, jumpy production values and an irreverent on-air presentation style. Tailor-made for its demographic target group, it reflected the interests and concerns of teenagers and early twentysomethings (an age group that had previously been marginalised by television programmers).
The ubiquity and popularity of the channel influenced the way youth talked, dressed, danced and made and consumed music. MTV was "cool" television and as such was the ultimate arbiter of tastes and fashions. An MTV style (short, sharp and led by sound-bytes in a fast and furious pace) became the predominant means of expression and later influenced the film world and the advertising world. By embracing high art and trash (artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Longo made music videos for them), it brought new visual ideas to light faster than any other medium.
Old Skool (to borrow a MTV neologism) practitioners, though, were quick to criticise this newfangled way of making television. MTV, they argued, was shrinking young peoples' attention spans and a professor of sociology (no less), Todd Gitlin, was wheeled out for the benefit of a tut-tut Time magazine editorial, to claim: "MTV has accelerated the process by which people are more likely to think in images than in logic - that's bad news for those believe in democratic discussion." Noam Chomsky was evidently not available for comment.
Ignoring the fact that "democratic discussion" is a pretty big phrase to throw at something as light as pop music, the more accurate criticisms aimed at MTV were that it was racist, sexist and "dumbist" and that it was guilty of - ironically enough - killing off rock music.