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We'll Always Have CarsonA stroll through the Top 10 videos in honor of Total Request Live's cancellation.

By Troy PattersonPosted Friday, Sept. 19, 2008, at 5:13 PM ET

Total Request Live on MTV. Click image to expand.MTV announced this week its plan to discontinue the video-countdown show TRL. In November, the show will begin an open-ended hiatus, presumably for brand-management reasons beyond this writer's understanding of marketing.

TRL began its life 10 years ago as Total Request Live. The original host was Carson Daly, who brought the vibe of a country-club cutup to the proceedings. The show broadcasted from a glass-walled studio above the tourist-choked purgatory of Rudy Giuliani's Times Square. Its initial list tilted in favor of R&B—mostly blue-eyed boy-band soul (Backstreet Boys, N*Sync) and the come-ons of ingenues (Aaliyah, Monica)—and further recorded the popularity of terminally bland alt-rock (the Goo Goo Dolls), tenacious power-balladeers (Aerosmith), family-friendly hip-hop (Will Smith), and a parent-irritating Goth with a big costume budget (Marilyn Manson).

Day after day, outside the studio, teenyboppers would raise posters for the show's cameras and their voices for its microphones, joining together in an effort to squealingly coin a word onomatopoeic of euphoria. Upstairs in the Viacom Building, MTV executives would hustle from a briefing on the emerging purchasing power of Gen Y to a conference call on synergizing with Britney Spears to a 75-minute spa session of bathing in the day's fresh money. At home, kids would phone in to vote, picking up a habit that would not only prime them for American Idol but also shape their idea, one sincerely dreads, of American democracy itself.

In the studio, there would be more squealing. With the addition of an in-studio audience, a teenybopper mob would cheer then, as it cheers now, for live performances and celebrity interviews and even matters related to education. Just the other day, TRL hosted a back-to-school fashion show: An editor from CosmoGIRL! advised that, while you might chafe at being expected to read The Great Gatsby, the novel still holds valuable potential as a style inspiration. If TRL ever does get revived, I do hope to see a summertime segment on Tender Is the Night swimwear.

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TRL's signature moment came to pass one Thursday in July of 2001, when pop diva Mariah Carey dropped in unexpectedly. She entered pushing a cart filled with ice-cream treats, wore a pair of shorts connoting assertive depravity, and gave voice to existential frustrations: "You're my therapy session right now, Carson." Her behavior was sufficiently erratic that the crowd couldn't squeal for it with any real consistency. She was a celebrity wreck, and in a nice little front-end collision of the pop rhetoric of empowerment and the marketing of lust, a halter-neck garment stretched across Mariah's chest reading "supergirl."

TRL now devises its countdown list by way of a formula that takes online votes, radio play, ringtone sales, downloads, and—just a hunch—some form of not-illegal payola into account. A glance at last week's lineup indicates what's on the minds of kids these days—mostly love, sex, and luxury goods, of course.

But the list is hardly all lewd: In contrast to Mariah's bizarro supergirl, we have, at No. 8, Alicia Keys' "Superwoman," a tribute to women in general and black women in particular, accessorized with a video absent of avarice and lust, unless you count the singer's breathiness at the chorus. Keys—variously seen sitting behind a piano and stepping into situations as an astronaut, as a single mother applying to college, and as Cleopatra—aims to provide uplift as passionately as Oprah and more mechanically than Otis.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.
Still from TRL by Brad Barket/Getty Images.
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