Even rockstars deserve seconds

John Behling -- Staff Essay

Picture this: the TV crew of "True Life: Riots in the Streets of New York" butting heads with the crew from MTV's "Real World vs. Road Rules: Knife Fight Armageddon." The blackened sky is pulsing with paparazzi flash bulbs far off on the horizon as two producers begin to claw each others' eyes after a heated exchange over who rented Times Square for the afternoon.

A new crew from the reality series "Reality TV Producers: Death Fights Vol. 1." sprints in, tape already running.

They have to duck into a fox-hole when a page from MTV is hit by a volley of artillery rounds from Fox News' "Fair and Balanced Pre-emptive Strike Force" camped nearby. They're trading rounds day by day with CNN's weapons of Mass Distribution and the casualties from interns alone has now risen to triple digits (although these numbers will be drastically under-reported to the public).

A few miles west, the military is co-leasing an enormous sound stage to film another high-octane "Army of One" commercial alongside the producers of Punk'd, who have fabricated four city blocks to convince nine A-list celebrities that they've just been in a gruesome double-decker bus crash.

All in the middle of this, Andy Warhol's corpse will sit up and yawn for a long time and then in a big flash of dull gray light it'll be all up: our 15 minutes of fame. Our civilization as we know it.

Okay, that was a bitter rant. But it was necessary in order to properly set up what I have to say against my feeling that Reality TV is pretty much the end of the world.

That being said, I really like VH1's new show "Bands Reunited." The show assigns a hopelessly inept host (Carson Daly, but even more pathetic for his ultra-earnest posturing) the task of ambushing the scattered members of one-hit-wonder-bands from the 80s and 90s (to name a few: A Flock of Seagulls, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Berlin) with a full camera crew and fire point blank the question: "Are you willing to get the band back together to play one more show?"

Sounds exploitive? It is. But the interesting thing is that these middle-aged men and women seem not to care. Most of them are delighted to do it.

It poses the typical discussion question: "Would you be on the Real World?" My first answer is no. But then .... Well, mine would still be no, but the point is, as disgusting as we may find reality-based television, deep down most of us are hungry for a little camera-love (or at least our promised 15 minutes).

However, it's different for these people. They've already had theirs.

So in effect, the show has given us a first look at post-15 minutes world. A world, which looks pretty much like, well, real life again. The once touted rockstars are now software salesmen, landlords, Web designers and even foreign language school owners. And they seem more or less happy.

Why would they turn in their dignity for what amounts to roughly a 20-minute pop-culture quickie?

That's the question I was asking myself before I saw the reformed "A Flock of Seagulls" take the Stage. And then I got it.

Watching the faces of middle-aged rockstars strumming and jamming like they're discovering it for the first time is strangely touching. These are the faces of people who are getting the most out of their second time around. They are doing the exploiting. While VH1 gets their soundbites and their cute 20-minutes, these men and women get a reason to re-establish long-discarded relationships and to play in front of people again.

This is fun to watch, because it looks like they're having fun, something today's flexing, posing, scowling pop stars and rock stars don't seem to be allowed to do. Perhaps they will wisen up when their second 15 minutes comes around.

Email Story to a Friend        Printer Friendly Version