Id TV: On MTV, it's always Spring Break.

The term "uncool" could have been invented for Al Gore, a man so earnest in demeanor that his idea of a good time is hosting dinners where the attendees solemnly discuss the use of metaphor. Those unfortunate enough to have seen the footage of Al dancing with his wife, Tipper, at the 1993 inaugural balls witnessed the embodiment of every cliche about clueless white men-he moved, without reference to the pop music blaring from the stage, in a herky-jerky pseudo-waltz, pumping Tipper's arm up and down like a piston while she smiled gamely.

So when Gore took the stage at the University of Michigan the other week for a town meeting cosponsored by the cable channel MTV, a real clash of cultures was taking place. In a similar MTV forum eight years ago, Bill Clinton had entered the precincts of coolness for the first time-a place he might not have been expected to gain entry to, considering that he claimed the soporific clarinetist Kenny G as his favorite musician-when he smiled his mischievous smile and admitted to wearing briefs rather than boxers. The moment was crucial for Clinton, since it began the process of lowering his soon-to-be-presidency to a level that would make it possible for him to survive his sleazy hijinks with Monica Lewinsky six years later.

Whatever else one may think of Al Gore, that sort of thing isn't his field. The 52-year-old man with the mien of the kindly but out-of-it dad who tries to "relate" to his rebellious teenage kids while they roll their eyes in obnoxious frustration was entering the belly of the beast. Gore took a stab at appealing to the MTV viewership with a well-prepared answer to an audience member's question about what's currently in his CD player. "Sister Hazel," he said, naming a soft-rock band of the moment whose music it's inconceivable he's actually been sampling on the campaign plane, but whom his daughter Kristin probably loves. The audience cheered, as it was supposed to, but despite his weather-beaten earth-tone shirt and an introduction pointing out breathlessly that as a young man he smoked "the herb," Gore was still very much himself.

For above all, Al Gore wants to be serious and be taken seriously-and MTV has become the open and undying enemy of all things serious and the champion and promoter of all things frivolous.

Ask people what they think of first when MTV is mentioned, and they will probably say "music videos"-understandable when you consider that MTV stands for "Music Television." Indeed, the recording industry and MTV are inseparable. The channel is crucial for the manufacture of new stars (most recently the bubblegum queens Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears and the ugly-spirited white rapper Eminem) and the preservation of its own, now-venerable Hall of Famers (like Madonna, the first enduring superstar of the MTV era).

But most of MTV's broadcast day is taken up with other programming, and has been for more than a decade. Despite its name, the channel is not really dedicated to music and never really has been. It's always been about cool, although the kind of cool it attempts to define has shifted radically since it first went on the air in 1981. You might say that, like Al Gore, MTV is constantly in the process of reinventing itself to stay fresh and keep its hold on a slippery American audience in a time of powerful competition.

At the time of its founding, MTV's target demographic was the twentysomething crowd, which was then preoccupied with ideas left over from the 1960s about the transcendent power of the two media that had coalesced to form the music video-artsy rock and artsy film. The channel, its videos, and its on-air announcers affected a blase comic nihilism punctuated by tiny explosions of social conscience in the form of save-the-suffering fundraising drives and symbolic one-world gestures of the day like Live Aid, Farm Aid, and Hands Across America. This spasmodic sense of mission gave birth in 1990 to "Rock the Vote," and in 1992 to "Choose or Lose"-MTV's quadrennial efforts to get American youth interested in presidential elections and the public-policy issues under discussion in them (always, of course, from a left-liberal perspective).

MTV was so successful at defining 1980s cool that, as is the inevitable fate of all cool places, the in-the-know folk it first attracted began fleeing to more exclusive climes as their ambitious and competitive juniors (and social lessers) began crowding in to take a look. As the twentysomethings fled, MTV transformed itself into the image of cool, not for those recently graduated from college, but for kids-teenagers and socially precocious preteens.

The channel's avant-garde affect gave way in the 1990s to a giggly and sophomoric tone devoted almost entirely to sex and titillation, which must seem like the height of sophistication to an 11-year-old in Terre Haute looking for the secret to appearing older. On MTV, it's Spring Break in Daytona Beach every day of the year, and I mean that literally: The channel replays its coverage of hard-body college girls taking off their tops in Daytona and other hot-weather climes throughout the colder months.

The music world from the '60s to the '80s believed, without irony, that it could save the planet. In the year 2000, the music world-as represented by MTV-believes in T&A. The characteristic MTV performers of the moment are Aguilera, 19, and Spears, 18, both former Mouseketeers on the Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Club, who combine faces of virginal innocence with the gyrating moves of aging strippers (one of Spears's videos was helmed by a porn-movie director named Gregory Dark). And the characteristic MTV show of the moment is an almost unimaginably raunchy late-night soap opera called Undressed, set at an unnamed college and featuring nightly three different badly acted vignettes about terrifically good-looking students who are either having sex, about to have sex, or just done with sex. The girls are very much in the Aguilera-Spears mold-appealing both to teenage boys for obvious reasons and teenage girls because of the admiration of teenage boys.

But the boys? The channel's male stars are mostly of the skinny and sweet-faced variety who sing prettily and pose no sexual threat whatsoever-members of boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, the present-day version of past teen heartthrobs like Bobby Sherman, David and Shaun Cassidy, the young Frank Sinatra, and the young Beatles. They are popular with the girls because they offer a fantasy version of sex without fear; and while young male viewers don't seem all that interested in them, at least the boy-band members don't offer much in the way of competition for girls' true carnal hungers.

Perhaps what Gore was doing on MTV was presenting himself as a kind of near-senior version of the Backstreet Boys-or, more precisely, of MTV's afternoon host, teen heartthrob Carson Daly. If the MTV crowd would think of Gore, not as the clueless dad, but rather as the unthreatening boy grown to middle age, that might give him a leg up with them on Election Day.

But if there's one thing you can say for certain about the kind of people who get their political news from MTV, it's that they don't vote. And it's not that they're too cool to do so. You could come up with all sorts of demographic explanations for the apathy and lack of involvement of MTV viewers, but the bottom line is that, like the medium delivering the message, they're just too stupid.