Volume 1: Too Long(ing)

For spring break, I watched six hours of MTV Spring Break 1999 and 2000

Recently I had a business idea worth millions. The idea is this - construct a replica of a college campus complete with dorms, a cafeteria, a student center, a gymnasium, a large grassy park, maybe even a pool and soccer field, and then charge adults to spend a weekend or a week there. You could maybe even just rent a real college campus over the summer. Think of it as an all inclusive resort meets one of those nostalgia cruises where Sugar Ray and Smash Mouth play meets college. Each floor could be decorated for a different decade. There would be keggers on the lawn, communal breakfasts, some bands, maybe even a mini-volleyball or soccer or frisbee golf tournament. It would be for people who felt like they missed out, or the recently divorced, or just those itching for one last hurrah.

I was telling someone about this idea and they asked how I came up with it and I couldn’t really give an answer other than it seemed pretty reasonable to assume people would want to relive the most hedonistic time of their youth. While it seems reasonable now, it’s not something that would have occurred to me any earlier than in my late thirties. Most of my life has been spent looking ahead. I looked ahead to being a teenager, then a college student, then of drinking age, then of moving to California, then of living alone, then of getting on a Harold team, then of selling a script. But somewhere around 35, I started looking back. Back to living with roommates, back to waiting tables, back to living in the dorms, back to being in high school. I don’t want to do those things again so much as I know I’ve done them for the last time. I still look ahead, but I also look back. A near 50/50 split. Almost as if this is mid-life and the fantasy about running a business where I get to relive college is either a brilliant enterprise or the definition of a crisis.  Everything I do is either a symptom of a mid-life crisis or a deliberate attempt to avoid one.

So as spring break rolls around, and this will be the last spring before I turn 40, I wanted to do something mildly sophomoric but with no real stakes. Mostly because I’m coward, but also because I’m desperately clinging onto what self-awareness I have left. I will not rent a convertible and drive across the country like my grandpa did when he had his mid-life crisis or sell my house and move to Oregon to write books like my Dad did, but rather something I probably couldn’t do a year from now or a year earlier. I watched six hours of MTV’s Spring Break from 1999 and 2000.

Six hours is not accurate. It was more like 75 minutes. I was able to find six hours, three from 1999 and three from 2000, but with commercials that were repetitive (something I remember), and the programming being anti-climactic (something I do not remember), I was able to get the gist of the experience rather quickly. And that gist is, we didn’t know how milquetoast we had it.

MTV started doing spring break programming in 1986 and apparently kept it going until 2014, a shocking twenty-eight years, meaning someone could have been conceived in the first year of the programming and then gone on their own spring break with MTV when they went to college. The programming usually consisted of live musical performances, stunts, competitions, early reality TV, and popular programming with a spring break twist.  From my living room in Evergreen, Colorado, there was nothing I wanted to do more than go to Cancun, Mexico and be in the crowd for Fashionably Loud while Dr. Dre and Eminem performed, or vote for the King and Queen of Spring Break on Springer Break. This was not FOMO because FOMO wasn’t a thing yet and I wasn’t afraid I was missing out. I could see what I was. And it was exciting. This was something closer to voyeurism. I was watching slightly older people who were still very young have what looked like a very hot and sexy time. By sheer coincidence, the two years I was able to find footage were two years I somewhat remember. I know this because I had recorded some of MTV Spring Break over a VHS of Dino-Riders, a cartoon about humans traveling through time and using dinosaurs to fight wars. Dino-Riders was awesome, but I was growing out of playing with toys and into playing with myself so I made the archival decision to preserve scantly-clad college students wiggling around on the beach. It was one of my first moments of arousal I can remember being able to recognize as such (unfortunately more on that later).

With my personal memories being so exciting, nostalgia in full force culturally, and me spending my late thirties thinking about my early teens, I was expecting a full on treat, complete with whip cream, sprinkles and a cherry. What I got was mostly a loaf of white bread. While it was fascinating, it mostly served to illuminate just how unremarkably actualized our recent past was and how popular David Arquette and Jerry Springer were.

Spring Break 1999

Carson Daly’s Say What Karaoke

By the power of the anonymous soul who uploaded their home copy, my first flashback to 1999 spring break is Carson Daly hosting Say What Karaoke. This game show consists of contestants spinning a “Karaoke Wheel of Death” and then having to perform a song for judges, Dave Holmes, Elisa Donavan and Kid Rock.

Everyone seems to understand how this works except Kid Rock. The judges are asked to score the contestants from 1-10. Kid Rock only manages to successfully do this once. He rates one pair of contestants a double zero because the song sucked. So the contestants get a zero because of the song they were given. Then he gives another contestant a score of 9-1-1 because and I quote “that was the shit.” Utter nonsense. And then he gives the last contestant a score of 23. Unclear why.

Before starting my Spring Break experience, I watched a video of Kid Rock calling himself a grandpa before machine gunning a bunch of Bud Light because they came out in support LGBTQ rights. Someone pointed out in the comments of his video that Bud Light still got the money from the cans he shot up. So at least it’s comforting to know Kid Rock has always been a moron, but seeing him in 1999 did make me nostalgic for a time when he was just an annoying dipshit and not a hateful moron.

None of the karaoke is good and no one, especially the hosts, seem to be having a good time. I’m watching a duo perform the “Macarena” and one of the contestants asks Carson if he can shout out his roommates Tom and Spaz. I am hit with a feeling I will be hit with repeatedly for the duration of my Spring Break. Most of the people in these videos are now in their mid to late forties. They are likely married, divorced, have kids, and some are probably dead. Also this was all pre 9-11.

These spring breaks are packed with commercials. What’s interesting is I don’t watch commercials now. Thanks to streaming my decision to pony up for Hulu premium and the fact that I don’t watch sports, these are legitimately the first commercials I’ve sat through in some time. Most of the commercials for 1999 are for 7-UP, a product I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Are they still advertising? What are they doing with their advertising budget because in 1999 they were spending it like crazy. David Arquette is hawking hard for 1-800-Call-ATT. There’s some commercial where a woman takes her bra off to hold her tail pipe on. I just watched it and am still not sure what it’s for. And it would appear the movies for 1999 are Ten Things I Hate About You, the Ben Affleck, Sandra Bullock vehicle Forces of Nature and oddly The Out-of-Towners an old person’s movie starring Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn and John Cleese.

WWF Beach Brawl

This is wrestling I guess. I already don’t have time for this. I’m not going to Cancun with college kids to watch wrestling. I wouldn’t do it at fifteen and I won’t be doing it at 39. Kid Rock seems to be hosting. Fast forward.

Springer Break. King & Queen. Fat Tuesdays.

Be still my heart and other organs. This I remember. For most of the nineties, Jerry Springer was super famous for hosting spectacle on TV. His talk show would have people attack each other and get naked. If The Real World ignited reality television, then Jerry Springer ignited pitting people against each other in non-sports semi-domestic scenarios for entertainment. Seemingly because his last name is Springer, MTV got him to host Springer Break. I guess he could have come to them, but he really never seems to be having a good time hosting.

The show is a showcase of amateurs doing dumb shit for a vacation or a little bit of money. In my memory there was a woman who covered herself in honey and feathers, a bunch of young co-eds who wrapped themselves in giant tortillas to make human burritos, the infamous cheating scandal where a guy admitted to having an affair with his roommate’s girlfriend that later turned out to be a hoax, and my fondest memories - the whip cream bikini runway and the king & queen of spring break.

The whip cream bikini runway had three girls and three guys walk the runway in just whip cream. This I suspect was a corporate tie-in with the MTV produced movie Varsity Blues where Ali Larter’s character attempted to seduce Paul Walker’s character by stripping naked and crafting a whip cream bikini over her private parts. So in what I imagine was 100 degree weather, twenty-one year olds danced down the runway as whipped cream dripped off of them. The censors blurred it out every time a nipple or penis or full butt protruded from the sugar and dairy, but in the days before nudity was easy to download, this was a treasure trove of side boob and butt crack. The only segment to outdo this one was the “King and Queen of Spring Break.”

Six couples compete for the title of king and queen and a tropical vacation paid for by some travel agency that I’m sure the internet put out of business two weeks later. Jerry hosts and interviews the six couples before having them do a little dance that the audience votes for by applauding. Every time they show the audience, they look catatonic. Jerry keeps making jokes that land absolutely flat, but the audience keeps chanting “Jerry.” I’m beginning to think they piped in audience cheers and chants.

This feels like it was cooked up five minutes before they started filming. Most of these couples claim to have met on Spring Break. If any of them are still together, I’ll eat my hat. When Jerry asks one couple if they’re celibate, the woman says  “there’s a little motto in Cancun, in case you just got here, what happens in Cancun, stays here, so no rules,” She says this directly into a camera broadcasting to MTV. Also that’s Vegas she’s thinking of.

After three couples are eliminated seemingly at random the remaining couples are tasked with changing swimsuits inside a VW bug while being timed. I could kiss whatever MTV producer came up with this little stunt because at fifteen seeing random amateur adults race to strip naked was a syringe of horniness injected right into my hypothalamus. I outgrew my pants before the sun set on Cancun. Even watching it a quarter century later, it still incites some residual titillation. The last event is popping balloons on their partner with their teeth and the couple who does that the fastest gets to decide if they answer a math question about a frat guy drinking beers or if the other couple has to answer. The fastest balloon-popping couple passes on the question and the other couple gets it wrong. It’s humiliating and weirdly anti-climactic. We just saw these people’s whole gennies, no one cares if they can do simple arithmetic. I wonder how often Matt or Nicole (that’s the couples name) are ever sitting at their respective kitchen tables because there’s no way they made it work together, and they’re trying to figure out how to pay for their child’s tuition or which cholesterol pills they already took and for a second they flash back to the day in 1999 when they got butt naked with a stranger on cable television and then couldn’t do math all to win a vacation to Aruba. If they’re well-adjusted, my guess is monthly. I once taught improv to a couple on a blind date for a reality TV show and I kept my pants on and I think about that every couple weeks. And it never aired. But I’m not well adjusted.

Blame Game/Tyrese performance

I don’t know what this is. I’m bored. The commercials I’ve seen have been for art school, the PlayStation game Oddworld, Visa, a Bioré self-heating mask, and the trailers for Mod Squad and Go. This advertising did not work on me as I think I’ve only seen Go. I can’t believe I just sat around through all of this for hours on end. I mean what else was I going to do? I didn’t have a phone or the internet. I should have been reading.

Spring Break 2000

A year later and the first person to talk to the cameras is Carson Daly hosting TRL from Vegas. It looks like this year they’re splitting MTV Spring Break between Vegas and Cancun. In Cancun, Rebecca Romijn Stamos is hosting who is 28 when she filmed this by the fucking way. I’m watching the model of my teenage dreams and I’m twelve years older than her now. I know that’s not actually how time works, but it kind of is. This version of her doesn’t know what thirty looks like as I’m trying to file an auto claim to get the city to reimburse me for pothole damage to my car. Even still, she seems older and more savvy than I am. Back in Vegas, Carson Daly is downtown as what seems to be punishment. What an odd choice he was for a host of music videos. I know this is going to sound mean, and I’m really not trying to be, but imagine being Carson Daly. Probably one of the more recognizable celebrities known by people ages 35-50. And no one has a serious opinion about him. It would be wasteful and off-putting to put in the time to not like the guy. And if you like him, that’s fine, but is there not anyone on the planet you could find that’s just a little bit more interesting. When you think of MTV, you think of The Real World, Jackass, Beavis and Butthead, Jersey Shore and a myriad of other visual shock jock inspired entertainment. Carson Daly just doesn’t fit the mold. For all their counter-culture and outside the box programming, they went ahead and chose a host who not only fit inside the box. He blended in to the paint on the walls.

Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child are both in Cancun, but his was before Jay and Bey started dating. They both look so young, and I say this with no disrespect, show no signs of becoming America’s royal family. They are by all measures unremarkably comparable to every other act at spring break. Let that be a lesson to us all. Your potential is not defined by the people you spend your vacations with. That being said, Dr. Dre and Eminem are also both here. Long before Eminem single handedly saved the music industry from pirating, and a technological eternity before Dr. Dre introduced us to Kendrick Lamar and made a billion dollars off headphones. So whereas MTV Spring Break 1999 had zero guests who became billionaires, MTV Spring Break 2000 had three. Maybe your potential is defined by your spring companions. Or maybe the producers of MTV Spring Break just got better at their job.

Celebrity Strip Down hosted by Ahmet Zappa

Or maybe not. This segment is very bad. Ahmet Zappa keeps calling everyone bitches but he pronounces it bee-otch-es. There’s a lot of criticism that people get famous today by doing absolutely nothing. Well Ahmet Zappa was laying claim to that level of mediocrity long before. Ahmet is explaining that two celebrity teams will play strip poker with human cards, people painted with numbers on them, to see which dozen co-eds, men or women, will get naked. David Arquette and Scott Cann make up the boys team while Tara Reid and Natalie Ritano make up the girls team. David Arquette really had a moment in 1999-2000. And shockingly Scott Cann is the only one of this foursome who seems to be thriving today. Women won the game so a bunch of men ran naked down the runway and then because it’s spring break two of the women took their tops off and ran down the runway. I wonder how many of these people ended up voting for Trump. All of them??

The commercials this time around are mostly 7-Up, 1-800-Call-ATT with David Arquette, and the Herbal Essences orgasm commercials. For movies it’s Final Destination, Road Trip, Whatever it Takes (never heard of it), and 28 Days, another Sandra Bullock movie. That’s two summer movies for her in two years. She has always been a national treasure. There’s also some made-for-TV movie called Jailbait, which I’ve never heard of. Then there’s a crazy commercial for an F/X original TV show called Harsh Realm with the absolute worst special effects I’ve seen. I don’t know this show at all, but the advertising suggests it’s too “harsh” for network television and people seem to keep exploding and disappearing. It’s at this point, I wish I had done this with someone because one of two things happens down this nostalgia vacation. Because nothing is that outrageous or really even that dated, one of two things will happen. I will either see something that I remember and get a mild hit of recollection that feels like going back to a restaurant you ate at as a kid and it’s not good but it is familiar and you can’t tell whether it never was any good or if it got worse. Or the other thing that happens is I have no recollection of it and I’m not sure if it was a thing that I missed or if it was never a thing and it’s weird that it left no impact. I’m too small of a sample size so I end up just watching it as if it’s new entertainment, and entertainment from twenty years ago made specifically to make you feel envious in it’s time for not being where the fun is happening is not very entertaining.

Say What Karaoke - Celebrity Edition

It’s back, but this time Dave Holmes has been promoted from judge to host. The judges are Tara Reid, P!nk and Ananada Lewis. The contestants are Teck Holmes from The Real World, Road Dogg from the WWE, Pauly Shore dressed up as David Lee Roth and then Cher, and Jerry O’Connell. Jerry O’Connell has been shamelessly running around on television for thirty years. I just saw he hosts Pictionary, a gig Jay Leno would turn down, and someone told me he’s part of a daytime talk show panel. Here he’s in a poncho, that he promptly strips off while singing Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like A Wolf.” Only it would seem Jerry picked the song without thinking it through because he’s mostly just shouting “do, do, do, do,” into the microphone. I can’t believe this is a place I wanted to go as a teenager. Tempt me with the suggestion a nipple might pop out in public and I’d sit through six hours of barely famous people shouting at people in their underwear. Sometimes I think about how moving to Los Angeles and becoming adjacent to Hollywood ruined some of the tinsel town allure because you start to see that all the shows and movies you grew up on and took as gospel were just written by weird, rich, but still sad, white guys. This is something all together more deadening. MTV used to be a channel where everything they aired seemed desirable. Looking back, it’s surprising any of it counts as content, let alone would ever be considered escapism. I’m not sure what happened. I think before social media it was enough to just put someone on camera. That was interesting. That made them interesting. On Cancun Undercover, camera operators follow four college women on their spring break. It couldn’t have been more bland. They swam with dolphins, got drunk, danced, did a wet t-shirt contest and went on a boat. They could have been your co-worker and you could have asked about their spring break, and then looked for a way out of the conversation before they finished telling you the name of their resort. Which makes me painfully aware of how telling you about this is just photocopying a copy of a copy of a photo of a firework. Sure, somewhere at some time that excited someone, but we’re miles from that experience.

No Doubt’s performance in Vegas seems quaint at this point. Tyrese is back. Sisqo is here. It’s mostly dancing. Like three hours of dancing. One competition is to dance your way to a date with Enrique Iglesias. It’s all very boring. There’s another Springer Break. This time we don’t get to meet the contestants at all. They are just trotted out dancing and then they have to do dumb little physical stunts to prompts like “King Cobras smell using their tongue, use yours to find your partner’s scent.”

For one segment, the women are blindfolded and they have to feel up all the dudes and find the guy they came with, all while being timed. One woman did it in like seven seconds and Jerry asked her how and she said “a little hair on his back.” The audience erupts like she said she ran over his dog. This year they swap outfits in a phone booth, which is strangely less steamy than the VW. I guess it’s less suggestive. People fuck in the back of cars, but only Superman changes in a phone booth.

It goes without saying but I’m going to say it anyways, people in the spotlight without a desire to be an influencer or go viral or endorse their brand seems almost pointless. And pointless isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In this case, pointless just means untethered to capitalism. People in the nineties and early 2000s, especially young people, wanted to be on camera because they associated it with fame, and because the opportunity to be seen by millions of people was rare. It didn’t matter if you did anything memorable and I don’t think there was ever a long game or the expectation that something else might come out of it. It’s almost enlightening. A moment of Zen arising from two co-eds smashing their bathing suit areas together because a camera was pointed at them and because Jerry Springer said to. At one point during the many dance sequences, DJ Scribble (remember him?) says “only on MTV” when a couple grinds on the runway. He was right but not in the way he meant to be right. Only on MTV would the act of just existing be broadcast. It wasn’t a means to an end the way it is now. It was an end in itself. It was salacious or taboo simply because it was a camera on someone who didn’t have lines they memorized. In 2000, your fifteen minutes of fame was reduced to a bull ride of eight glorious seconds of you wiggling your butt and then it evaporated and left you euphoric. Today if less than 4 million people watch your rehearsed, shot, and edited character sketch, you are drowned out by a rat carrying a piece of pizza, and left with a feeling of existential irrelevance.

Well it’s over. The screen went blue the way VHS recordings do when there’s no more images to display. I’m exhausted and feel a little empty. It wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be, but then again spring break never is. Expectations are a dangerous game. It didn’t make me feel bad like I’d grown up or been shaped by thoughtless and harmful content. It was thoughtless but mostly in the way parties usually are. The more I watched the more it was exactly as I remembered it, which is to say it was mostly boring and a little sexy. I built up the idea that watching it would be fun because I wanted to be transported back not to the experience but to the conditions. When I last watched MTV Spring Break I was young with a week off from what little responsibilities I had and I spent it fantasizing about partying in college. It was a period of hopeful escapism. I was nostalgic for looking ahead. That’s an unsatisfying recipe.

I’m still going to try and get Shark Tank to invest in my college dorm resort. I expect the reviews will be bad because I’m cashing in on people’s false memories that their past was better than their present and most will leave with the sobering feeling that it wasn’t. But people won’t believe the reviews because we don’t want to be told how things were. We want to believe how we remember feeling.