Mtv

MTV is once again fighting for a piece of the huge Super Bowl audience specifically, the halftime channel surfers. The music network, which last year debuted its "Celebrity Deathmatch" claymation series during the Super Bowl intermission, will counter the big game the same way this year. "Celebrity Deathmatch Deathbowl '99" will be timed exactly to coincide with halftime and will include a running clock onscreen to let viewers know when it's time to return to Fox's Super Bowl telecast.

Music video finally has come into its own. Beginning Sunday, the Neighborhood Film/Video Project at International House presents a five-part series of programs that celebrate music videos as an art form. "Art of Music Video: Ten Years After," which has its East Coast debut here, is a retrospective put together by California's Long Beach Museum of Art. Each 100-minute segment explores a different aspect of music video as art. Two segments in tandem will be presented over successive Sunday evenings.

It's a sad commentary that Stevie Wonder needs MTV more than MTV needs Stevie Wonder. This wondrous superstar has been written off by soul radio for cranking out too many middle-of-the-road ballads like "I Just Called to Say I Love You," while MOR radio, ironically, has rejected his most recent album, "Characters," for being too hard-rocking. And by and large, Wonder's always been too black and too funky for the narrow minds who program and tune in album-rock radio. So what's a Wonder to do?

It's 1981. A cold wind is blowing through pop. Disco is dead. All the hip, new British trends - from punk to neo-ska to new romanticism - are getting the brushoff from U.S. radio, which has left us at the mercy of the most numbingly corporate of American rock. Styx, REO and Journey rule the airwaves. All this blandness is beginning to backfire. Pop sales are down from the industry's peak year (1978, fueled by "Saturday Night Fever"). The music world is ready for a shake-up. MTV didn't provide one right away.

The Rolling Stones were defining loud, driving, electric rhythm 'n' blues- based rock 'n' roll half a decade before a band like Led Zeppelin was even born. But those who only know the Stones by their best-known hits, like "Satisfaction" or "Jumpin' Jack Flash," are missing another wonderful side of the band: its great slow numbers and ballads, most still rooted in the blues, like "Wild Horses" and "Tell Me," and most of the tracks on the classic "Beggar's Banquet. " Happily, the band is helping to plug any gaps in memory, or history, with a new CD called "Stripped," which includes more than a dozen acoustic performances and whose video version debuts Sunday at 7 p.m. on MTV. In spite of the fact it's acoustic and being shown on MTV, this is not officially an "Unplugged," though for all practical purposes it is musically the same thing.

Count on MTV to put a new spin on the game-show genre. Fans of such warhorses as Jeopardy! will need to gear up their metabolism a notch or two to watch MTV's new entry in this venerable field. Idiot Savants, part of an image makeover unrolling on MTV this winter, will premiere at 7 p.m. tomorrow. Sixty-five episodes will be televised at the same time Monday through Friday. The host is Greg Fitzsimmons, a fresh-faced and hip young comedian. As illustrated by a visit last month to the Idiot Savants set, which occupies a ballroom in the Pennsylvania Hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden, the question categories are all youthful: songs by Prince before he changed his name to something unspeakable, James Bond movies, famous Dicks (Dick Clark, Dick Cavett, the two actors named Dick in the cast of Bewitched, etc.)

"Your momma's so lazy, the last time she had a job, the minimum wage was slavery. " - White winner insulting black loser on MTV IN THE CLIMACTIC showdown in the movie "8 Mile," the character Rabbit humiliates his hapless black opponent in a rap contest staged right in the 'hood in which they take turns ridiculing each other. Of course, since Eminem was the star of this supposedly autobiographical vehicle, everybody expected the white guy to get the better of the brother.

Music Television - MTV - celebrates its fifth birthday Friday with, quite frankly, the kind of resume not many 5-year-olds have built up. During MTV's lifetime, the flashy look of music video has changed our fashions, TV shows, movies, records and ads. From "Miami Vice" to a Cherry Coke ad, that's video we're seeing. Furthermore, to most people, music video is synonymous with MTV. It is the Kleenex and Xerox of its field. It is also a major economic force. When cable TV comes to your hometown, MTV just might be its biggest selling point.

Aug. 1, 1981, and MTV - the 24-hour music-video cable channel brought to you by Warner Communications and American Express - goes on-line, offering state-of-the-art graphics, state-of-the-art rock videos and state-of-the-ar t commercials that look and sound like state-of-the-art rock videos. America goes wild - young America goes wild, anyway. Music videos are heralded as the wave of the future, a spanking-new art form, savior of the then-foundering record industry. "I want my MTV!"

Please! Say it ain't so! Rumors stir the alcoholic waters of Jersey Shore that MTV may cancel the show due to star Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi 's babymaking! Snooks says, yep, she and fiance Jionni LaValle have an egg under the light, and now, say shadowy Sources , MTV wonders if it can go forward with Season 6 this year. I mean, MTV official mouths say that's crazy. But . . . what would they do without Snooki getting in barfights, using people's porches as her ladies' room, and getting nabbed for boozing on the beach?

MAYOR NUTTER talked Fox 29 out of airing a video that captured him spanking the buttocks of a blonde with whom he drank and bowled at North Bowl (909 N. 2nd), say sources familiar with the situation. A Fox 29 viewer recorded Nutter and his female companion having a blast about 2 a.m. one day last summer, sources say. We're told the cellphone video is of high-enough quality that you can hear the two butt slaps Nutter delivered to the woman, identified by our sources only as Andrea , as she got up to bowl.

For MTV, the situation was more than awkward. In fall 2008, the network was bingeing on manufactured reality shows that celebrated wealth and excess just as the country was staggering into a recession. Banks were failing, people were losing their jobs, and college students were facing uncertain futures. But on MTV, the glamorous clique from The Hills was indulging in West Hollywood shopping trips and getaways to Cabo San Lucas. And on My Super Sweet 16, the parents of a South Carolina beauty queen spent tens of thousands of dollars to give her the perfect birthday party, with a baby-blue Hummer.

Beyonce Knowles stole the show before it even started. The soon-to-be-30 superstar arrived at Sunday night's MTV Video Music Awards holding her bulging belly while dressed in a loose-fitting, flowing red gown. MTV tweeted the news, and photos confirming her motherly status soon circulated. Suddenly Lady Gaga's much-hyped opening number, during which she performed as a greasy, leather-jacketed male alter ego, became less important. Britney Spears was the night's first award winner; others included Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry , who won a trophy with Kanye West for her video "E.T.

NEW YORK - Lil Wayne is hoping his performance on the MTV Video Music Awards will be so good, fans will rush out and get his new album: He's making it digitally available at midnight after Sunday's show. The rapper said he's the first artist to release an album this way after an awards show. Lil Wayne is up for two VMA awards. "Tha Carter IV" will be available on iTunes, Amazon.com and other digital outlets. The physical album will hit stores Aug. 29.

The fourth season of MTV's Jersey Shore premiered this week with the crew descending on Florence, Italy. I don't think I've ever been more proud to be an American. The kids conducted themselves with all the dignity, respect, and class we've come to expect of them. In other words, none. Vinny was the only one who did his homework. "I want to learn the language," he said. "I want to master it. " Of course, immediately afterward, Vinny also said, "I'm so much more better-looking [than the other guys]

ADELE, Chris Brown and Lil Wayne have been announced as the first performers for the MTV Video Music Awards, which will air Aug. 28 from Los Angeles' Nokia Theatre. Adele, whose sophomore full-length "21" is the best-selling album of the year, will make her MTV VMAs stage debut. The British singer is tied with Kanye West for the second-most nominations with seven, while Katy Perry leads all nominations with nine. Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" will compete against the Beastie Boys' "Make Some Noise," Perry's "Firework," Bruno Mars' "Grenade" and Tyler, the Creator's "Yonkers" for Video of the Year.

FOLLOWING THE JEWISH tradition of a quick funeral, Amy Winehouse was laid to rest yesterday in London. The singer's father, mother and brother and close friends, along with band members and celebrities - producer Mark Ronson; "Fashion Police" personality Kelly Osbourne, her hair piled beehive-high in tribute to Amy's trademark style - were among several hundred mourners at Edgwarebury Cemetery in north London. The service was led by a rabbi and included prayers in English and Hebrew and reminiscences from Winehouse's father, Mitch Winehouse . The cab driver and jazz singer, who helped foster his daughter's love of music, ended his eulogy with the words "Goodnight, my angel, sleep tight.

AWKWARD. 11 tonight, MTV. JENNA HAMILTON just wants what every other 15-year-old girl on MTV wants: to stand out from the crowd, no matter what it takes. Fortunately for Jenna, the focus of the network's newest scripted series "Awkward," standing out won't require quite as much as it does of the real-life stars of "Teen Mom," the "reality" hit that's "Awkward's" far-from-graceful lead-in. Though Jenna (Ashley Rickards) does, as she puts it, get deflowered in the show's first few minutes, this isn't, she assures us, the "inciting incident of some sappy special about how I got knocked up on the last day of camp - I knew better than to bareback.

As a star of MTV's Jackass franchise, Ryan Dunn made a career out of cheating death, one cringe-inducing, skin-crawling stunt after another. Early Monday on a Chester County highway, that daredevil streak caught up with him. Dunn, 34, of West Chester, died just before 3 a.m. when his Porsche 911 GT3 veered off the westbound lanes of the Route 322 bypass in West Goshen Township. It careered through a guardrail, flipped over into a wooded ravine, crashed into a tree, and burst into flames.