Doldrums Too Loud at MTV Awards

Where’s Soy Bomb when you need him?

The dancing wild man who took the stage alongside Bob Dylan on this year’s Grammy Awards show could really have helped at the nationally televised MTV Video Music Awards, which originated Thursday from the Universal Amphitheatre.

Say what?

The MTV Awards needing that kind of boost?

Usually at these televised shows everyone’s a potential Soy Bomb. And MTV has always had a little surprise up its sleeve to give the evening a buzz.

This is the show that gave us the return of Pee-wee Herman after his arrest for public lewdness. This is the event at which Michael Jackson kissed Lisa Marie. This is where last year a spacey Fiona Apple pleaded with her fans about, well, something that seemed important to her.

The big surprise this year?

Ginger Spice. And that wasn’t until near the end of the show when, virtually unrecognizable without, as she put it, her “drag queen” appearance, the former Spice Girl presented the video of the year award to Madonna, capping Ms. Ciccone’s six-award domination of the proceedings.

In a night that had such unpredictable figures as Courtney Love, Marilyn Manson, Madonna, the Beastie Boys, Master P, Snoop Dogg--even Wu Tang Clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who also disrupted the Grammy show this year--on stage, you’d think someone would give the crowd something to buzz about. Sure, Manson bared his rear, sort of. But Prince, Howard Stern and, last year, Manson himself had already been more cheeky about it.

Two impassioned speeches did make impressions. Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, during the group’s acceptance of the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, pleaded for peaceful responses to terrorism and an end of racism directed at Muslims. And Wyclef Jean bit a hand that feeds him, criticizing the film “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”--to which he’d contributed a song--for an AIDS joke at the expense of his native Haiti.

That was it for current events. Here the only Monica that mattered was the singer paired with Brandy, not the former White House intern.

Love, fronting Hole’s first performance in three years, brought out her old punk-rock attitude, snarling at the microphone, throwing her guitar down at the end of her band’s run-through of the song “Celebrity Skin” and, later, getting snotty and rude in the press room backstage.

The problem is that Love seemed to be wearing her punk trappings Thursday like she wears Versace at Hollywood premieres--it’s something she puts on when it suits the occasion. And something she can shed just as easily. She used to seem like a rock star. Here she seemed merely to be acting like a rock star, and the crowd, by and large, was not buying it.

Marilyn Manson, on the other hand, acted like a bona fide rock star. His “The Dope Show” performance was glorious rock theater, over-the-top in a winning way as much as his anti-Christian diatribe on last year’s show was an over-the-top turnoff. It was one of the few performances on the show that made you want to see a full concert by the artist.

The others that accomplished that: Madonna’s “Shanti”/”Ray of Light” medley mixing neo-spirituality and club-kid energy (with a dreadlocks-less Lenny Kravitz joining on guitar), and the Pras-led “Ghetto Superstar,” a roiling blend of rap, soul and rock featuring a cast (including the aforementioned ODB) as full of flash as its pyrotechnic finish.

Host Ben Stiller was brilliant in two taped segments, one with him as a fired co-founder of the Backstreet Boys, the other with him as Bruce Springsteen (in a dead-on imitation) revealed to be a closet Puff Daddy fanatic getting to meet his hero. But in the show itself he wasn’t given much to do.

All in all, MTV won’t have anything to update the recently aired show examining controversies and conflicts at past VMA events. Will Smith told the crowd he wanted to confess something that happened backstage before it got on the news--he fell down. That’s about as outrageous as it got this night.