TV REVIEWS : MTV Looks Back at a Warped 1993 in Rock Circles

Reluctant Time cover boy Eddie Vedder mumbles incoherently from behind a line of empties. “Pint-sized paparaz-a-phobe” Shannen Doherty proclaims--Nixon-like--”I am not a bitch.” The “lead breast” of global phenomenon “Baywatch,” Pamela Anderson, extols the wonders of Zen in a meditation-provoking one-piece. Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.) assails “what is it, Buffcoat and Beaver, or Beaver and something else.” Ike Turner swears he only punched her once.

Must have been the year in something. For lack of a better term, it’s MTV’s “Year in Rock” (tonight at 8), that reliable annual compendium of kitsch, which finds no shortage of folly-recap fodder in 1993. Sometimes an hour just isn’t long enough.

Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren co-host once more, looking positively geeky posed yards apart from one another on a cheesy set that’s only a step up from MTV’s vintage VJ backdrops. But once you get past the hosts’ uncomfortable Dan-’n’-Connie patter, the hour is--as usual--an invaluable compilation of footage of pop-culture moments best forgotten after one last disgusted chuckle.

The positive side of ’93 is dispensed with early, with a look at the year’s chart-toppers (in which it’s duly noted that actual rock continued its comeback). Most specific are segments on the “hip-hop doo-wop” trend and women emerging as pop’s musical powerhouses (a cliche true enough to be worth its notation here).

Those bits are informational enough, but interest picks up when Loder stoops to detail “a year of living stupidly.” Here, in one handy place, you can get a list of the year’s pop arrest records--from Vedder’s public drunkenness and Shannon Hoon’s indecent exposure charges to Flavor Flav’s attempted murder and Tupak Shakur’s forcible sodomy allegations--that seems to go on as long as a biblical genealogy.

Most everyone represented in “rock” here, from LaToya Jackson to Susan Powter to messengers Bobbitt and Buttafuoco, is afforded a byte of less than 10 seconds, so the pain factor is definitely diminished. And remember, those who don’t dismember the past are destined to repeat it.