Unless you actually pay attention to MTV or any of its various offspring you probably have no idea that the MTV Movie Awards even exists. Or that it’s this coming Thursday. Or that Gnarls Barkley is performing (or AFI or Christina Aguilera).
Anyone who actually watches this meaningless “awards” show definitely needs to get out a little more, and now with YouTube and TiVo etc., periodically flipping to the show to try to catch the Gnarls performance won’t be necessary. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The real question here is if this Gnarls performance will actually matter.
Ever since “Crazy” reached the top of the UK singles charts, Gnarls was destined to be the recipient of the 2006 Indie’s New Big Hope Award (with a generous thanks to previous winners Sufjan Stevens, Franz Ferdinand etc.). “Crazy” is obviously this year’s “Float On”/“Take Me Out” except that Cee-Lo and Danger Mouse have the eccentricity and (just enough) charisma to maybe turn their act into something that people care about for more than 2 ˝ weeks.
Occasionally MTV will let an indie act play on one of their award shows. Too bad they tend to mess it up each time out. A few years back The Hives and The Vines put on an absolute horrid Battle of the Bands type of thing and in 2004 Yeah Yeah Yeahs did “Maps.” That performance did nothing in the way of making YYYs important in an MTV way, it was all freak-out Karen O and a stage set-up that was Teletubbies-esque (read: WTF?).
So I don’t expect anyone to pay attention or to care about the “Crazy” performance beyond 12 year-old girls asking themselves why a huge black guy is dressed like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. Which isn’t to say that the performance won’t be fucking great. On Top of the Pops earlier this year Gnarls and a 20+ ensemble dressed as pilots/other airplane personnel—an absolute “call your friends immediately after to discuss” kind of performance.
So my prediction is Gnarls will do their thing in grand fashion. Maybe VH1’s Best Week Ever will give it a little air time. Maybe they’ll snag an SNL gig. But just like all the other “indie” acts to play an MTV awards show, they’ll probably fall by the wayside and the few of us who think that it would be cool for a true indie act to actually make it big in the US will have to wait for Arctic Monkeys to (finally) catch on.