Without ‘TRL’ MTV is just TV

MTV’s “Total Request Live” is going off the air after a decade, and all we can think about is Mariah Carey.

Flashback, summer of 2001: A glassy-eyed Carey unexpectedly wanders onto the set and begins to wriggle out of her T-shirt.

“All I know is, I want one day off when I can go swimming and look at rainbows and, like, eat ice cream,” she says dreamily, as host Carson Daly’s chuckles grow increasingly panicked. “And maybe, like, learn to ride a bicycle.”

Try to find anyone age 18 to 29 who does not remember that moment.

So when MTV announced this week that “TRL” would broadcast its last fizzy countdown show in November, it felt like the end of … something.

Not that the show, which premiered in 1998, was ever that great. Formatwise, it’s uber-low-concept: Bunch of high-pitched teens pile into a Times Square studio and watch the day’s top music videos, emceed at first by Daly, later by a parade of lesser-known VJs.

Occasionally an “it” boy or girl of the current music scene drops in for a chat and to pump a new release.

The featured videos, democratically selected by Web votes, are generally arguments for musical dictatorships. Think: “I Want It That Way” on endless repeat through most of 1999.

Producers eventually instituted a “retirement home,” where such songs as “Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)” could rest up for a while.

But the music – at least it’s there. The very presence of music on MTV has become a novelty, as the rest of the station’s lineup degenerates into back-to-back “Real World” spinoffs.

That “TRL” managed to hang on as long as it did is more surprising than the news that it’s being canceled.

With the on-demand availability of YouTube, why waste time voting again and again and again for your faves at MTV.com? Why not just watch “I Want It That Way” 57 times in a row online, retirement home be darned?

Still, there was something nice about how “TRL” taught us about patience – waiting, with fingers crossed, to see whether our wish-list video would make the show.

The end of “TRL” is not the day that music died. But it’s kind of like the day that music television died.

Without “TRL,” MTV is pretty much just … TV.