Do me a favor. Picture MTV’s “Total Request Live” at the height of its powers. Carson Daly shouting to be heard over an audience of excited adolescents. Feuds stoked daily between teenyboppers like NSYNC and teenymoshers like Limp Bizkit. Overflow crowds standing on Broadway to scream at the slightest glimpse of a chart-topper in the second-story window of New York City’s One Astor Place.
Now, imagine all that delirium, sign-waving and call-in voting was in service of pushing Art Garfunkel to the pinnacle of the premier music video countdown. Ridiculous, right? Garfunkel’s tender folk couldn’t be farther from the chrome-coated zeitgeist of the turn of the last century. The musicians who supplanted the East Village folkies were by that time dinosaurs themselves, having been rendered extinct by pop permutations several times over. Daly’s daily countdown was about an eternal present, a shiny go-go now that had no time for the dour, mildewy Neil Young worship of the early ‘90s, to say nothing of the decades prior.
