Remember when MTV used to show videos, and they were actually cool? Ah, those were the days.

I bet the kidz today don’t even know the song “Sledgehammer.” Blasphemy!

I am going to assume the tide started turning when I graduated from high school, because that’s when I stopped watching MTV. But then as a sophomore in college, I was visiting New York City over winter break. My friend Michelle and my sister Katie and I wound up outside the studio for Total Request Live with Carson Daly (and guess what, it is totally not live) and I requested the song “Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z because I had lived a life of hard knocks in the upper middle class suburbs. Another young girl near me requested a song called “…Baby One More Time” by some chick named Britney Spears. Who was she?

She was that innocent.

At any rate–our show was supposed to be on within the next couple of days so I had my VCR set to record TRL. And then . . . they didn’t show my request. But they did show Britney!

And life has never been the same since.