Watching the MTV Video Music Awards was an odd thing this year. My tastes have long fallen well outside the mainstream, but my general interest in music coupled with my job as an A&E writer for a daily newspaper contributed to keeping me at least somewhat in the loop. I can't remember the last time I listened to the radio (other than NPR), and, as we all know, MTV doesn't show videos much anymore (except during award shows, oddly enough), so it has been hard to stay up on what's hip. In the year since I left the daily newspaper and with it my last good reason to pay attention to things that don't really interest me, I find I have lost almost complete touch with popular music. Of those featured, only Green Day, who was the big winners last night, can be found in my collection these days (I have a burn of that Killers disc, but can't say I listen to it much). Until last night, I feared I might be missing out on something.

Instead, the event seemed to validate my blindered approach to popular music. Much of what passed for the cream of the crop last night was hopelessly middling. My Chemical Romance? A resurrected Mariah Carey? Another tribute to the Notorious B.I.G.? This is the best there is to offer? Well, no, of course not. This is MTV, where style almost always trumps substance. Sure, Kanye West is interesting, Green Day well worth honoring and, um... did I mention Kanye West? But overall, the show held true to form. Only this time, I felt like a Dad behind his TV tray watching the Beatles on "Ed Sullivan" wondering what these crazy looking kids were going on about. It doesn't take long these days for your knowledge to lose almost all relevance. It's like studying for a test for which the questions constantly change. Coldplay seemed to be the only bone thrown to people who aren't 16, and they were flat.

One good thing: I was able to hear, for the first time in its entirety, Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," a song so hip even Ted Leo has taken a crack at it. Somehow I evaded this ubiquitous track (see comment about the radio above and couple it with a self-imposed Reality TV blackout at Chez Kenyon) for several months. Verdict? It's OK for Top 40 fodder, but nowhere near what expected after seeing it referred to as sounding like "Evanescence's Amy Lee singing over an Interpol outtake" (thanks for that bit of wisdom, Pitchfork). It's not as if guitars are completely absent from the Top 40, which would be the only way to explain such over-compensating, euphoric rhetoric from otherwise sober... well, OK, it was Pitchfork.

Ultimately, last night found me missing the fun of stupid pop culture at the same time I realized I wasn't missing much. I wouldn't spend a lot of time listening to any of what I heard last night even if still paid to do so, but in a weird inverse of "you don't know what you've got until it's gone," I found that I can't fully appreciate skipping out on pop music until I know what I'm missing.