How "MTV Cribs" Rewired My Brain, and Maybe Yours Too

[Ubiquitous]

The show gave us a giddy peek at the nouveau riche celebrities of the 2000s.
It also made "fake it until you make it" the Millennial ethos.

What would you do if you got really rich?

Perhaps you've had a series of whimsical, wishful, na‹ve conversations
centered around this question. I grew up having a bunch of them: at pool
parties and sleepovers, at recess and in the back seats of Chevy Suburbans on
the way home. Then lazily but dreamily, in study halls with high school
friends. And after that, a bit nervously, with other underclassmen at the
start of college, when the arc of life's prospects begin to get realer.

There was a time among my cohort of '90s babies when little of our energy was
spent imagining vast riches. But then - at least in my middle-class corner of
the American South - everybody started watching "MTV Cribs."

"Cribs," a documentary-style reality television program in which tours of
celebrities' homes are given by the stars themselves, premiered in September
2000, when neither Instagram, the Room Rater account on Twitter nor iPhones
existed, when the music business was flush and 'N Sync had recently sold 2.4
million CDs in a single week.

Kim Kardashian, Simon Cowell, Naomi Campbell, Beyonc‚, Nelly, Usher, Outkast,
Pamela Anderson, Aaron Carter, Backstreet Boys and others, however briefly,
were friendly enough to give us a private tour.

There was nothing better than getting home from school and seeing Lil Wayne
and Birdman of Cash Money Records show off their six bedroom, six bath,
swamp-adjacent McMansion - with a plethora of custom luxury cars outside and
an enormous Jacuzzi inside the living room.

It must be said: The show was incredibly comfy to watch and the vast majority
of architecture and design on display was, by contemporary standards,
incredibly bad. The clashing themes, the bedrooms with multicolored carpeted
floors and Roman columns in random places. The oddly placed game rooms and
monogrammed foyers, each one seemingly larger than the last. The garish
dining areas decked out with fish tanks or ornaments like a fainting bed near
the kitchen island - an actual scene from a famous Mariah Carey episode.

Seen with the binoculars of 2020 many of the cribs on "Cribs" may appear
tacky, even emetic, to the sleek, refined minimalists - such as Marie Kondo,
Kyle Chayka and Joshua Becker - who've proliferated in recent years. But so
what?

For viewers and the stars featured on the show, wealth, especially when it's
newfound, is not about calculating then acquiring a set of signifiers -
subtle or diligently visible - that aligns you with old money or the palates
of the young college grads gentrifying your city. Wealth is instead a means
of getting to have all the things and all the fun you have ever wanted but
couldn't yet attain.

In Mariah Carey's tour of her reported 11,000-square-foot, three bedroom,
five and a half bath, multi-walk-in-closeted, tri-level penthouse in Tribeca
in 2002, she opens the door to us, dressed to a tee, her hair music-video
flawless, and informs us coolly, "It's an Art Deco apartment." And that she
loves the glazed orange walls simply because "they look like candy."

She shows off a copy of "Architectural Digest" that features her apartment:
"I didn't grow up in a house that belonged in `Architectural Digest,' trust
me," she says. Then, peeling back the diaphanous curtains of the nearest
window, she reveals a lush northward outlook of the city at night, the Empire
State Building gleaming.

"When I was little I always wanted a penthouse apartment in New York with a
view like this. Took me quite a while because all the co-op boards kept
telling me no," she said, sarcastically dragging out the "no" with an
affected posh tone. "Now it doesn't matter because I got my own, hm-hm!"

On "Cribs" there is, blessedly, little talk of vintage armoires passed down
or bought at auction. No chin-stroking about whether a property is actually a
bit more Edwardian than Victorian.

Watching as kids, there was an unvarnished symmetry to what we would put in
our big homes if we got rich and what these celebrities, who actually got
rich, put in theirs. Watching now, in the midst of this decade's
suffocatingly granular obsession over cultivated looks - and its public
policing of taste - the early-to-mid-2000s world of "Cribs" is an
aspirational, if sometimes funny, breath of fresh air.

Just beyond the giddiness of getting a peek at the nouveau riche, though, was
an insidious implanting of rudderless, capitalist instincts deep into our
still-forming brains. I'd like to think that I watched "Cribs" with my
siblings and friends solely as comfort food to be consumed, digested, then
mentally excreted.

In hindsight, however, it probably affected the neural circuits in our brains
that regulate motivation. When not awe-inspiring the show was still inspiring
in a simpler sense: If you didn't want a crib like that (and there were
plenty of eccentricities to not like), you definitely wanted the money to be
able to own a crib like that.

Correlation doesn't equal causation. But having never harvested thoughts
about extraordinary wealth, after years of watching "Cribs," "I'm gonna be
rich when I grow up" became - along with the rote mission of doing good - a
central life goal of mine for a while. In that, I'm sure I'm not alone.

Even once I entered adulthood and had to get a normal job, having failed at
becoming a pro athlete, the show's lavishness still probably inflected my
decision-making. Like when, at 22, I rejected more stable employment in order
to work at a glossy magazine, making little money but rubbing up against
fame, wealth, art, excess and open bars as a matter of course.

Naturally, "Cribs" wasn't alone in manufacturing what's now called clout
chasing. The decade it belonged to was flush with wealth worship, class
striving and conspicuous consumption. MTV's "Pimp My Ride," VH1's "The
Fabulous Life of .," ABC's "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" and NBC's "The
Apprentice," hosted by Donald J. Trump, are all indelible.

But soon enough, the people watching experienced the lies a corporate-sold
American dream can spin when the housing bubble - built on fraud, debt,
earnest ambition and "Cribs"-like McMansion dreams - burst.

The jig seemed to be up for "Cribs" as well when the market crashed in 2008.
The show went into syndication that fall (though it has had smaller reboots
since).

In time, we discovered the details of the show's deceit. There are now
listicles scouring the rampant rags to riches humbug that was under our noses
all those years, like "12 Celebrities Who Totally Lied About Their Homes On
MTV's `Cribs''' and a definitive list from BuzzFeed, "MTV Cribs" Was Pretty
Much Fake And Here Are The Receipts To Prove It."

The Miami house associated with the rapper Ja Rule, who starred in a 2001
episode, was, for instance, actually a rented mansion, included without the
permission of the owner, who later sued him, alleging that he and his
entourage threw a large party that caused property damage.

This failed attempt at faking it until you make it merits, in one respect,
unbiddable laughter. In another, laughing at Ja Rule is probably just a
haughty form of projection. A way to deflect how hyper-competition and
artificial scarcity created by unfettered markets have pushed nearly all of
us to ridiculously embellish our public facade at times when it's
advantageous or eases awkwardness - in internet bios, job interviews, even
small talk.

Helen Lewis of The Atlantic recently explained how "middle-class kids born
after 1990" had the great luck of entering "the work force in the post-crash
decade, when a comfortable adult life began to seem like an unachievable
dream."

Forget renting a mansion. Try renting a reasonable two-bedroom with basic
amenities in a major city.

I rewatched "Cribs" this summer, half-quarantined in my Brooklyn apartment,
mostly as an escape. The hope was to distract myself from the coronavirus
deaths and economic woes that I cover on a daily basis by revisiting the
come-ups of celebrities who feel on top of the world.

My favorite episode features Aaron Carter, the child pop star and younger
brother of Nick from Backstreet Boys. Wearing cargo shorts and a white
graphic T-shirt adorned with Tupac's face, he jauntily welcomes us to his
family's gargantuan 17 acre compound in the Florida Keys.

He starts the tour in a room so homey compared to the rest of the compound
that it's almost jarring. He proudly shows off family photos of him and his
brothers in charming mismatched frames, apparently bought before anyone
became famous.

Speeding in a convertible mini-jeep, he takes us to the family yachts, to the
studio, to his dogs' favorite couch, to his drum set and his "love shack."
Joking the entire time, he just seemed happy being himself and psyched about
being rich.

Recently, I made the mistake of Googling Carter, now 32, to see what he's up
to these days. I found that, like many child stars, he's been in and out of
rehab - struggling with addiction and money problems. In September, his
brother Nick filed a restraining order against him.

I almost went down the sadly substantial online rabbit hole about Aaron's
struggles, but stopped myself, and flicked back to the "Cribs" clip of him.
When there was still a boyish tilt to the cap hanging off his head, and so
many less serious thoughts in mine.

It's better this way.

--
"It took a worldwide pandemic. It took a 35% plunge in the stock
market. It took quarantining. It took many small businesses closing. It
took canceling practically everything, to bring the USA economy back to
the Obama high mark."