The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [161]
Kusbit talks about the way TRL benefits from its identification with Times Square in much the same way that John Eyler does about Toys “R” Us. “It is the center of pop culture,” he says, “and TRL is so much about trying every day to be at the center of pop culture for its audience.” The show has, in fact, been criticized for offering up a steady diet of teenybopper music to the exclusion of grittier, less mainstream performers; but in this regard TRL is no different from Toys “R” Us or the ESPN Zone or McDonald’s or any of the other mass merchandisers of Times Square. It’s a democratic show, in the lowest-common-denominator sense in which the developer Bruce Ratner describes 42nd Street as a democratic experience. TRL gives people what they want, rather than telling them what is worth wanting. As Kusbit says, “The beauty of it is that the show is about the people anyhow. They vote for the most popular videos, they pick the order of the videos, we talk to them out in the street.”
Total Request Live is really about providing youth culture with an image of itself. It is, on the one hand, a sexually charged self-image. Both the lyrics and the videos themselves are overtly sexual in a way that would have left the kids on American Bandstand goggle-eyed. The same is true of those giant images of siliconized teen babes on the billboards out the window. And yet the atmosphere of TRL is friendly, wholesome, fun-loving, even innocent. The studio audience, which functions as a microcosm of that culture, consists of eighty or so teenagers, almost all of them nicely dressed and well groomed and wildly enthusiastic, sitting in bleachers around the stage. The girls are almost guaranteed to cry if they get a chance to meet J. Lo or a Backstreet Boy. Carson Daly himself has often been compared to Dick Clark, the host of American Bandstand. He asks innocuous, not to say vapid, questions, never pries, always finds nice things to say to the kids in the audience, and has pep to spare. And he makes a point of standing up for good values. At one show I attended, he introduced Joel, who appeared to be working at the show on some kind of internship. “Joel thought up ‘The TRL Spelling Bee’ and ‘Spin the Bottle with Britney,’” Daly explained. “We made a deal with Joel—keep your grades up, we’ll keep you in the show.”
In other words, TRL has the same kind of reciprocal relationship with the Times Square brand that Toys “R” Us does: it offers an upbeat, consumer-friendly image of pop culture, and thus of Times Square, the world’s capital of pop culture; and it uses Times Square’s own image to help shape its own. It has, in effect, created a Times Square of its own— a sexy, friendly, brand-conscious, rocking Times Square, a Times Square of Naked Cowboys rather than Midnight ones—and made that place vividly real to millions of people who live far from New York. It is, in fact, something of a joke among hard-boiled New Yorkers that tourists will gaze rapturously at the Virgin Megastore on the other side of Broadway and say, “That’s the place we saw on TRL.” And of course they have seen it as well on Good Morning America, and on CNN, and in countless TV shows and movies. They have consumed the Times Square brand before ever actually coming to Times Square.
I SPENT AN AFTERNOON at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in the company of Mark C. Taylor, a philosopher at Williams College. Taylor is a deconstructionist, or perhaps a postdeconstructionist, who believes that the sharp distinction most of us insist on between “the real” and “the virtual,” or “the not-real,” is perfectly untenable and mostly reflects an atavistic wish for things to be just what they