Dispatches They Want Their MTV Awards

By PETER KAMINSKY, in Los Angeles

Every industry has its obligatory annual gathering, its see-and-be-seen scene. For rock 'n' roll, it is the MTV Music Video Awards ceremony. It's not that the awards themselves are important; hipness wouldn't allow for that. Winning has little effect on record sales, and there isn't even a nickname -- no Oscar, no Grammy -- for the award statuette. The MTV awards are not so much an official imprimatur as they are the pretext for an all-star rock concert where, just by showing up, your coolness credentials are revalidated.

Last week's spectacle was three different events: the live show in the Universal Amphitheatre, the TV show on the home screen and, most important in this town, the show backstage, where record executives in slimness-enhancing Armani suits high-fived and talked jive with the mainly white, mainly grunge stars of the class of '93.

Madonna and Janet Jackson were the big acts booked, but the thrillingest personages backstage were a basketball player and a sitcom actor. Shaquille O'Neal was besieged by pose-with-me picture takers. And the man who turned every head was, curiously, Michael Richards, as spacy- and bemused-seeming in person as his Kramer character on Seinfeld.

) Madonna and Jackson retreated to some celebrity inner sanctum with security befitting a visiting Pope, but the young garage-band superstars -- Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Spin Doctors -- were as ingenuous and casual as their audience. Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was mistaken for a nobody until he produced his all- access laminated pass for an effusively apologetic security guard. When his wife Courtney Love appeared with their infant daughter, she pleaded with the paparazzi, "Hold it, my baby needs some psychic space." By the count of three, however, the child had apparently recuperated, and rock-star wife and rock-star baby posed for the cameras. The only real downer of the night was rap star Snoop Doggy Dogg's arrest after the ceremony in a real-life murder investigation.

The public show was subdued. Host Christian Slater felt called upon to ask for applause for Madonna, whose cross-gender opening number, straight out of Berlin 1929, set a mix-and-match postmodern tone for the performances. Lenny Kravitz and Soul Asylum did their respective versions of the early '70s. Sharon Stone, perfectly pretty in her pink '50s prom dress, was Barbie, live. (In postshow remarks, she volunteered an answer to the question everybody wants to ask Sharon Stone: "Did you fish and hunt with your dad growing up in Pennsylvania?" She did.) U2's the Edge, with a channel-surfing video wall and Deep Space Nine outfit, was pure 2001. And when Pearl Jam performed Neil Young's Rockin' in the Free World with Young himself, neo-'60s avatars alloyed with the genuine article and made the ecstatic audience feel as if they were in just the right place at the right time. Whatever time that is, exactly.