Total Regrets Live

Posted by Marisa November 10th, 2008 at 10:15am In Music Videos

TRL goes dark on November 16, after MTV airs a two-hour special they’re calling “Total Finale Live.” Carson Daly’s coming back for it and everything. (But will my not-so-secret crush, Gideon Yago, return to do the news?) To pay tribute to the show, TiFaux has planned a whole week of music-video musings.

Not that TRL itself is all that worthy of commemoration. Most of the time, they chose to broadcast only an excerpt of a video in favor of showing the faces of hysterical teenagers. But with the end of TRL comes the end of any kind of music on MTV, even if it was just lip service at the end, and that’s significant given the network’s mammoth role in the history of popular music. Sure, we’ll all still watch videos on the Internet, but we won’t all be watching the same ones anymore. It’s bittersweet.

Here’s another fun fact: My older sister—the one who sat me down and explained to me who Britney Spears was when I visited her in college, making college seem even stranger than I imagined it to be—was actually on TRL once. She requested “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind because Stephen Jenkins was so hot WOOOOOO! She showed me the tape of it—from the same VHS on which she’d recorded the “Baby One More Time” video—and then told me afterward that they told her which video to request (well, they gave her a choice of ten) and told her what to say. (She was all, “What should I say?” And they were all, “Just call the band hot or something.”) So, there’s my insight into TRL in its last week. It was all a lie.

But videos aren’t lies. Videos are great. After the jump, I list my five favorites.

Speaking of lip service, in Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” video, the song seems like an afterthought and is only tangentially involved with what’s going on. But look everybody, it’s Bob and David! And they come up with a “School of Rock” conceit before the Jack Black movie.

The Eel’s “Last Stop This Town” has all of the hallmarks of a great music video, including robots, weird doppelgangers, and out-and-out strangeness. I kind of want a machine that can clone me from a carrot so I can sing duets with myself.

I love Weezer’s “Keep Fishin’” because I can’t tell who is cuter, Rivers or the Muppets. They’re all so cuddly.

This more than anything else makes me want to run around and make movies with Spike Jonze. Or at least wear the wig. (My apologies for the shoddy video quality. It was the best I could find.)

They Might Be Giants has a lot of great videos, but Laura Cantrell makes a cameo in this one, and she makes an ultra-adorable face that rockets this one to No. 5 on my list. Also, I get a kick out of seeing the chords pop up.

…and, for good measure, here’s a video of aforementioned Gideon Yago.

In it, he gets himself checked for STDs. (The first thirty seconds after the ad are priceless.) Sexy.