Party of One

by Dave Holmes

  6. “What a Girl Wants”—Christina Aguilera

  The success of Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men in the early 1990s ruined singers for an entire generation. Suddenly, vocals became an arms race; if you weren’t doing runs from the second you opened your mouth, what were you even doing? Better singing became more singing. I’ll bet you nobody born after 1992 has even heard the National Anthem without the whole “Land of the freeeEEEEE” curlicue toward the end. Although Christina clearly had a voice, she also couldn’t help herself but to beat you about the head with it. This is her at her most subdued, which is still pretty belty.

  5. “The Hardest Thing”—98 Degrees

  These guys were the only boy band that had actual, across-the-board sexual credibility; unlike the Big Two, you could picture any one of them just giving it to someone. It helped that they were a few years older than their contemporaries. It did not escape my notice that they all seemed to own a copy of Form, Fitness, Focus: The Marky Mark Workout. But really, their gesticulation game was on point—lots of palms on hearts, fists on temples, hands reached out toward the camera. They were performing lovesick kabuki theater for an audience of mid-pubescent teenage girls (and me). I interviewed them more times than I can count—98 Degrees was always down to stop by the studio—and once, my producer Don said: “Guys, I’m going to need you to squeeze in closer to Dave. Nick, you get on one side, Jeff, you’re on the other. Tighter. Tighter still.” It was morti-titillating.

  4. “Blue Monday”—Orgy

  I only put this on here because it is my understanding that Orgy used to be a hair-metal band in the ’80s. Then they got kind of grungy in the early ’90s like everyone else, and finally, for the late ’90s, they went a little goth. Goth was a good move because it was kind of starting to become a thing and these guys were opportunists, but mostly because goth means makeup and these guys were old. I interviewed these guys before a concert once, and I saw them without the pancake, and it was like: “Dad?”

  3. “Bye Bye Bye”—NSYNC

  This video was the moment the band turned from boys to sort-of-older boys. The moment the label put Justin front and center and kept him there. The moment the rest of the guys sat Chris down and said: “We need to talk about your hair.” NSYNC had weaker songs than the Backstreet Boys at first, but from the moment in this video that the song drops out for a moment and Justin looks into the camera and laughs, it was clear who would be running things in 2000. I knew every move from this video and broke them out a lot. Everyone at the network did. We were grown-ups. It didn’t matter.

  2. “Baby One More Time”—Britney Spears

  I think I was the one who interviewed Britney the first time she came into the studio, but I don’t know, because a lot happened in those years and who even knows where the tapes are. All I remember is that the MTV message boards were all lit up about her before this video was even released. The girls knew her mostly as NSYNC’s opening act and maybe Justin’s girlfriend, and they had their knives at the ready: BRINTEY SPEERS SUXS! When I met her, I found that she did not sux at all, but was in fact a total pro: media-coached to within an inch of her life, a little dazed by all the attention, but talented. My agent at the time was a fan, and he told me: “I like that she’s a little fat,” and that’s when I started to realize I might be in an industry that was fundamentally evil. Also, I have tried my whole life to look as cool as the first kid out of the classroom in the bucket hat, and I have never come anywhere close.

  1. “As Long As You Love Me”—Backstreet Boys

  “I Want It That Way” is an obvious all-time classic, but this video set the template for all the boy band videos to come. Each Backstreet Boy is presented in a variety of attitudes and styles, each shirt is shiny, and each lip is moist. They are in some sort of casting session in a warehouse full of old cars and basketballs, being put through their paces by a very Amanda Woodward group of businesswomen, until the Boys turn the tables, grab the remote control, and turn the women into a bunch of extras from a Buffy the Vampire Slayer party scene. The dreamboat setting is turned up to its maximum here. One of my more significant TRL memories is seeing Kevin’s eyebrows for the first time and thinking: Mister, you have my respect.

  I never did spring break in college, so my first experience of Cancun happened at age twenty-seven, when a person is much too old to experience Spring Break in Cancun, but years of watching MTV had primed me for an experience. I flew down for my first one in the late afternoon in the spring of 1999, after shooting a few episodes of Video Cliches, so I didn’t get to my hotel until around 10:00 at night. Right away, I saw the truth behind the fantasy Simon Rex had fed me for so many years.

  As I checked in, a young man in a backwards baseball cap and a torn tank top with vomit somehow down the back stood wobbling by a house phone, trying to call up to his room. Evidently he’d lost his key or his wristband or both, and he needed someone to bring him up. After a few tries, he made contact, and moments later, the elevator door dinged and an angry Midwestern sorority girl stomped out. She too was unsteady from day drinking, her face puffy with tears as her bare feet slapped against the marble of the lobby floor. “You piece a shit,” she growled at him as she stalked closer, “fuckin’ piece a shit.” She grabbed his arm and led him back to the elevator, sorority letters on the ass of her shorts fading into the distance. This guy must have flirted with another girl, or disrespected her in some way over the course of however many frozen things they’d downed, and now there would be hell to pay.

  This is what they don’t show you: the strained relationships, the anger, the consequences of drinking sugary drinks in the hot sun. It’s ugly. I’d rather watch Jerry Springer. (Which would have been easy, because we brought him.)

  It immediately became clear in Cancun that if you wanted to have a nice, calm drink with your grown-up friends—and talk, and hear one another, and not have anyone try to pour tequila and sour mix directly into your throat and blow a whistle in your face—you were out of luck. But, hey, a job was a job and a free trip to Cancun was a free trip to Cancun.

  One day when I had neither an on-air assignment nor any particular desire to be on the beach with the college kids, I got a call from my production manager friend Kirtie, who was about to go on a location scout for an upcoming shoot. “Come with me,” she said. “It’ll be a fun way to see the sights.” I agreed. So we hopped in her rental and saw the sights, or at least the sights that would attract young people, so we might as well have been seeing the sights of Orlando. We rolled up to a popular daiquiri place with a big stage, a view of the beach, and a disturbingly large crowd for 11:00 a.m.

  A young bar-mitzvah-style DJ named Timbo took to the microphone and shouted “WHO’S READY FOR THE DANCE CONTEST?” We were not ready for the dance contest, because it was 11:00 a.m., but we were intrigued, so we followed the sound of DJ Timbo’s voice. The place was arranged amphitheater-style, and the crowd fanned out before him. “NOW, TIMBO IS IN CHARGE OF WHO DANCES WITH WHO, SO GET READY TO MAKE A NEW FRIEND.” Okay, this seemed fair; you didn’t want people who’d workshopped a routine for weeks. To begin, DJ Timbo picked a shirtless nineteen-year-old boy from one side of the audience and a blond sorority social chair from the other. “Livin’ La Vida Loca” played, as it always did in 1999, and couple #1 danced. Immediately, they ground their hips into each other, really letting the rum and sugar take control of their crotches. It was an inspiring performance. The crowd cheered. Kirtie and I smiled. Youth!

  DJ Timbo pointed into the crowd once, and then twice, to select couple #2: a massive linebacker from some southern state school, and a tiny Italian-American spitfire from, let’s say, Delaware. They bobbed up and down next to each other, and the crowd was tepid. And then their eyes met, their need for validation kicked in, and they chose to step it up. Football Guy picked Li’l Bits up with one hand and bounced her up and down. But the thing is: he picked her up by her undercarriage. He stuck one hand in her thigh gap and up she went, like she was a tray
of hors d’oeuvres. Or really, more like she was a tiny painter’s palette, because his thumb was pretty much right inside of her. Li’l Bits whooped, playfully slapping at his hand. “Oh, you,” her laughing face seemed to say. “Get your hand out of my vagina!” The crowd ate it right up.

  So obviously couple #3 was going to have to bring it, and Kirtie and I huddled closer together out of fear for what that might mean. DJ Timbo selected a guy in the board shorts/white socks pulled up all the way/flat-brim cap uniform of the Orange County surfer dude and a girl with the tight, oiled-up curls of Bijou Phillips in Bully. And as the song switched to Jay Z’s “Can I Get A…,” Bijou made a brief show of bopping before pulling OC’s board shorts down and putting his dick in her mouth.

  His dick.

  A stranger’s dick. In her mouth.

  On a stage. In Mexico. In front of two hundred hooting, slobbering, still-drunk-from-last-night college kids, two horrified adults, and DJ Timbo. At 11:03 a.m. on a Wednesday.

  Couple #3 won, in a ferocious, deafening landslide.

  The prize was a daiquiri.

  The Spring Breaks, Summer Houses, and Winter Lodges weren’t just opportunities for young people to molest one another, they were also chances for MTV to try new things, to produce specials that would act as pilots for potential future shows. If they worked, they found their way onto the schedule. If they didn’t, they didn’t.

  If they really didn’t, sometimes we faced legal action.

  In the winter of 2001, we were on a ratings high. TRL felt like an institution, having been on the air for an epic two-and-a-half years. NSYNC and Backstreet Boys were selling a million records a week, and new boy bands like O-Town and LFO were plucking their eyebrows in the wings. (Boy bands were such big business, David Letterman had a fake one called Fresh Step that would make occasional guest appearances.) Limp Bizkit and Korn were still the inexplicable choices of the high school jock, moments away from passing the “rock band with a rapper and/or DJ for some reason” torch to Linkin Park, Incubus, and Crazy Town. The Corrs almost happened, for God’s sake. The music business and MTV were flush. It was time to party.

  We rolled up to the mountain community of Big Bear, California, for our annual Snowed In weekend with a bunch of ideas up the sleeves of our ski jackets. We’d do a mountaintop Say What? Karaoke. We’d film a House of Style special and show young women how to expose their navels in winter temperatures. On Celebrity Dream Date, we’d pit teams of girls against one another in a series of physical and mental and probably emotional challenges for the chance to go out with 98 Degrees. We’d also force one girl into an acting exercise, as she would be asked to appear delighted to be paired with Justin Jeffre. (Justin was 98 Degrees’s bass voice. He would go on to run for mayor of Cincinnati, which explains why 98 Degrees always looked like three guys from a boy band and one mayor of Cincinnati.)

  In one of the Celebrity Dream Date challenges, five teams of four girls would ride an inflatable life raft down the bunny slope to the picnic area, where they would grab a token or answer a question about Nick Lachey’s ab regimen or something. I don’t remember, but I do know this: when the production team rehearsed this segment, the bunny slope wasn’t nearly steep enough for the life raft to pick up any speed. This rehearsal took place about twenty minutes before the show was scheduled to start, so we needed solutions and we needed them fast. A production assistant suggested spraying the bottom of each life raft with WD-40, and with the clock ticking, it was decided that that was absolutely the way to go. The teams of four girls ran to their rafts, hopped in, and with a tiny push took off exactly like greased lifeboats. The packed-down snow of the bunny slope and the dependable lubricative powers of the WD-40 proved to be a dream team, as five teams of four girls screamed downhill at speeds almost too high for our camera crew to capture, stopping not so much near the picnic area—studded with metal tables and benches that were bolted to the ground—as in it. They made impact in a cloud of snow, limbs, and ski hats that looked like a bar fight from an Andy Capp strip. Paramedics were called; bandages and splints were applied; and Nick Lachey was dispatched to the area to give hugs, defuse tensions, and gently suggest that nobody contact a lawyer. And the show went on.

  The higher-ups at MTV especially wanted a talent and variety show, wherein contestants could show off their strangest skills, scored to the hits of the day. (And the stranger and more dangerous or repulsive the skill the better, this being the dawn of Jackass.) As with The Gong Show, a panel of celebrities would judge these performances. And should they deem one especially awful, they would pull a chain, activate a sound effect, and the act would be removed from the stage while the audience chanted the show’s title: Dude, This Sucks.

  Here is the story of Dude, This Sucks, as I remember it.

  A bunch of producers had gone up to Big Bear early, to mix among the local youth and try to find acts for the show. Pickings were pretty slim: Lots of pretty girls who could Hula-Hoop and white boys who could freestyle. Nothing outstanding. No must-see act. And then they got an idea.

  A month or so before, we had held our annual Sports & Music Festival in Lake Elsinore, a desert city where the extreme athletes would have plenty of room to do their tricks. I had hosted a special edition of Say What? Karaoke there, and among our acts were two filthy, bony desert rats whose names I don’t remember, but for our purposes, let us say they were both named Cody. Cody and Other Cody wore bleached-blond Eminem haircuts and A. J. McLean facial hair. They wore very baggy party trousers, had piercings in their faces, and had tattoos in semicircles over their navels, phrases like “Only God Could Judge Me” or “Thug Life” or “Who Farted,” in calligraphy. I don’t remember what they sang, but I am confident in my assumption that it was Papa Roach’s “Last Resort.” Cody and Other Cody were the reality behind the character of Jesse Pinkman, and they frightened me, but they made for good television. (I was approaching my thirtieth birthday by this time, and things that frighten old people are by definition good television.)

  Lake Elsinore was just a short drive from Big Bear, so a smart young producer named Kelly (names have been changed, for reasons that will reveal themselves long after any sensible person will have stopped reading) called one of the Codys to see if they’d be interested in doing an act for the show. “Do you have any crazy talents?” she asked.

  Cody demurred, “Not really, yo.”

  “Are you sure?” Kelly said.

  “Nah, I mean…”

  “You could do anything. Be crazy!”

  “Well…” Cody confided, “sometimes I do this thing where I put my asshole on the water jet in a hot tub and I fill my ass up with hot tub water and then I shoot the water out, and I can hit a target.”

  Kelly responded the only way a hard-working MTV producer on a mission to attract young eyeballs could: “Can Other Cody do it, too?”

  Cody said, “No, but I bet I could teach him.”

  Kelly said, “Perfect.”

  The host of this show would be Kevin Farley, Chris’s brother and a very funny actor in his own right, who was currently starring as the Justin Jeffre of MTV’s parody boy band “2Gether.” (Kevin has since turned his attention to conservative comedy, having recently appeared as a combination of Michael Moore and Ebenezer Scrooge in the alleged comedy An American Carol. His swerve rightward may well have been precipitated by the events of this day, which, again, may God have mercy on you if you read that far.) Kevin had never hosted anything before, and this show was going to have a lot of moving parts. I was going to be the show’s announcer.

  More thought than you would imagine went into the production of a show called Dude, This Sucks. Each act would have to build, and each one would have to incorporate music. It was not enough for a kid to juggle balls; he would have to juggle two, then three, then five balls, to the strains of “Mambo No. 5,” and his act would be called something like, “Flying Bega Balls.” Acts needed to feel current, fresh, outrageous.

  And so it was decid
ed that the sight of Cody and Other Cody shooting water out of their anuses and hitting a target was insufficient on its own. There would also need to be staging, and it would need to match the boldness of the act itself. It would go like this: two people on stage would be roasting marshmallows over a campfire. There would be a sign a few feet away from them that would say, in large letters, NO OPEN FLAMES. Cody and Other Cody would make their entrance in park ranger uniforms with tear-away bottoms, shake an admonishing finger at the rule-flouting campers, and then they would tear away the bottoms of their uniforms and extinguish the fire with the water that they had brought onstage inside their bodies. This would be set to the Bloodhound Gang hit “Fire Water Burn.” The act would be called “The Shower Rangers.”

  Now, I was only peripherally involved with Dude, This Sucks, but when I saw the description of this act in the show’s breakdown, I thought, “Oh, this cannot be.” I asked a producer whether I had really just read what I had just read. “I know, right?” she said with pride. “That’s our opener.”

  The whole production department was in Big Bear for Snowed In, and this show was the last thing we were shooting, so everyone was hanging out backstage. Shortly before the show started, I caught the eye of a higher-up person in production, and I asked him whether we were actually going to do what we were actually going to do. He said, “Can you believe it?” I agreed that I could not.