How 'TRL' Helped Me Cope As A Kid In The '90s

After school, I would skip past my usual Nickelodeon cartoons and turn to the coolest channel I knew: MTV.
Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

This is part of This Made Me, a HuffPost series paying tribute to the formative pop culture in our lives. Read more stories from the series here.

In the fifth grade, I became convinced the popular kids were watching me at home — specifically, monitoring what I watched on TV. There was no evidence to support this fact; as far as I knew they didn’t live anywhere near me, even if their parents let them out to stand in our front bushes and peer through the blinds to see what I had selected for after-school entertainment. I would have called it anxiety, but it was 1998 and I hadn’t yet learned that word.

I was an awkward, sensitive, insecure kid. I assumed there was some kind of handbook I missed out on that told everyone else how to be and what to do. I needed instruction to protect myself from the world; I was 10 now, and couldn’t do the babyish things of my past, the kind of things easily picked on by middle-school bullies real and imagined. So after school, I would skip past my usual Nickelodeon cartoons and turn to the coolest channel I knew: MTV.

It was early enough in the network’s tenure that, as the old joke goes, the “music” descriptor in its name was still accurate. When I tuned in shortly after getting off the bus, I’d be greeted with the same thing five days a week: some vaguely alternative-looking host named Carson Daly welcoming me to “Total Request Live” and dutifully counting down the top 10 music videos of the day from a studio in Times Square.

As the name implies, “TRL” viewers could vote for their favorite music videos via phone or online form, and the results would be aired the next day in front of a live audience. It was, in essence, a popularity contest. I could never guess what my peers would think was cool, so I learned, at least, what MTV and its viewers thought was cool — smoldery-eyed boys who promised to love me forever, midriff-baring starlets whose fashion I was supposed to emulate, the club nights and spring breaks I assumed came standard with the teenage experience.

“It was where I watched fandom up close for the first time — the crying, the screaming, the handmade posters, the unabashed love for something that couldn’t love you back, not exactly.”

The more I watched, the more invested I got — it was a thrill to see which artist came out on top that afternoon. Unofficial rivalries formed: ’NSYNC and Backstreet Boys regularly traded the No. 1 spot at first, then later, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera battled it out. No one I knew was paying attention to Billboard charts or album sales, perhaps more standard measures of music success — if someone made it on “TRL,” they made it. You could gauge a pop star’s true influence by how fanatic the “TRL” crowd was when they made an appearance in the studio. It was where I watched fandom up close for the first time — the crying, the screaming, the handmade posters, the unabashed love for something that couldn’t love you back, not exactly.

Growing up on Long Island, it was easy for me to make the “TRL” studio a stop on a day spent in Manhattan. Not that I ever saw the inside. The floor-to-ceiling glass studio where stars came to debut their latest video looked down on Times Square, and it was common for crowds with posters to cluster on the sidewalks below, a spillover from the studio audience. Shouting to people who can’t hear me in the middle of a tourist trap is exactly the kind of activity that seems deeply unappealing now, but back then, it was something to do in the city, some way to get a little bit closer to the people on screen.

The first time I ventured to the “TRL” crowds with my mom, we realized Lance Bass of ’NSYNC was visiting the show that day. We joined the crowd and craned our necks up. He came to the windows and waved. The crowd erupted. I snapped a photo with a disposable camera, waited a week for the film to develop, and squinted at the snapshot to see if I could make him out. It was, of course, worse quality than any photo of him I could find in a fan magazine or online. I didn’t even care that much about boy bands at that point. But still I stuck it in a photo album, a story I could tell. I had proof: He was there, and so was I.

It’s hard to state the kind of influence “TRL,” and MTV in general, had over preteens and teenagers in the late ’90s and early ’00s, before Spotify, or YouTube, or even burned CDs of pirated music were de rigueur. For me, it was the easiest way to consume and understand pop culture, to get a how-to on what it meant to be a teenager with unwieldy desires and outsize passion that had few acceptable outlets.

The show gave me enough of a pop culture foundation that I didn’t feel so totally out of place when someone put on “Tearin’ Up My Heart” or “All I Have to Give” at a sleepover or school dance. Being able to scream-sing the chorus with other girls didn’t exactly secure me a seat at the cool kids’ lunch table, but it gave me what I wanted then — sameness, the chance to blend in to a crowd and forget for a little bit my fears and my pubescent body and whether my crush liked me.

That’s why I think “TRL” appealed to me more than the other programming MTV offered or the unscripted, meandering hours of music videos the network sometimes aired. Countdowns hardly changed much day to day; shifts were subtle. A once-top-tier music video would move from No. 1 to No. 4 over a few weeks, then linger at the bottom of the pack before quietly disappearing.

The joy of discovery or the appreciation of art weren’t my priorities then. I just wanted to watch the same thing everyone else was watching in predictable numerical order. By the time I reached high school, of course, I would crave the opposite — nonconformity above all, achieved by buying the same parachute pants at Hot Topic as everyone else — but not yet. Just being another music fan watching at home was enough.

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