As I promised (threatened?) last week, I’m going to start sharing a range of “lost”/ephemeral presentations here on an occasional basis. I don’t plan on making any revisions to the texts themselves (a bit of format-cleaning and typo-fixing notwithstanding) — and this also means that there will be citational shortcomings, since I have always edited those bits out of whatever version of a text I use when I make an oral presentation. But I will try to offer a few words of additional context and/or reflection up front.
First up is the very first conference paper I ever gave: “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch): Taking the Myths out of MTV” at the Popular Culture Association conference in Toronto in March 1990. Having re-read it just now for the first time in decades, I’m (happily) less embarrassed about it than I expected to be. There are parts of it that I wish I would have phrased a bit differently, and if (for some reason) I were trying to present the same argument now, I would probably tighten it up a bit more. But I can also see a number of themes here (especially the pushback against simplistic, ahistorical understandings of how media and popular culture work) that have stuck with me for the past 30+ years . . . even if this is probably the only semi-extended text I ever wrote about music video.
To say that recent years have seen a dramatic upsurge in the academic study of music television would be a gross understatement of the facts; one might more accurately describe the body of scholarly work which has accumulated on the subject as a veritable flood. What is striking about the academic furor over music television is how diffuse and varied the debate actually is. It is impossible to reduce the body of scholarly work on the subject to a specific set of consensually important questions and issues. Examining the literature on the subject, it is difficult to tell that this small army of critics are all describing the same cultural phenomenon. Ironically, however, most of these scholars are not only attempting to analyze the same medium, they are attempting to examine the same specific instance of that medium (namely MTV), to the virtual exclusion of all other sites of conjunction between music and moving images.
The manner in which MTV has been isolated from the broader spectrum of music television is itself symptomatic of the way in which critics have wrenched their descriptions of music television from its place on the wider terrain of popular culture. It is not enough simply to recognize that music television has historical forebears if one then goes on to analyze the medium as if it existed in a cultural vacuum. As Grossberg reminds us,
understanding music television requires us to identify and locate its specific complexity. We need to look at it contextually and relationally, to ask what is unique in the diverse practices of music television, and what they have in common with other cultural formations.
From an institutional perspective alone, music television marks a site where a vast host of practices intersect; its roots include not only the television and recorded music industries, but also the industries associated with radio, advertising, and cinema, and given the diversity of music television’s pedigree, it becomes difficult (if not impossible) to understand the medium as an offshoot of only one of its ancestors.
Music television, then, is an example of what Hay refers to as “recombinant culture,”
a sense of culture whose centers (of knowledge, of power, of identity) are reproduced from competing and past discourses; where the sense of the center is thus contingent and multiple; and where there is constant struggle over that center via competing discourses.
Music television is new only in the sense that it appropriates and recombines various sights, sounds, styles, and practices of previous forms of popular culture in innovative and unique ways. While music television is significantly different from older forms of popular culture, its difference is based not so much in a radical break with the past as in its recombination of elements of previous forms into a style of its own.
The body of scholarly literature on the medium is riddled with myths: misconceptions based on the misunderstanding of the medium’s variegated roots, and traces of old arguments over other media which are carried over into the analysis of music television. This paper will focus upon four of the most common and misleading of these myths, four misconceptions which serve more to block our understanding of the role music television plays in our culture than they do to advance it.
One of the earliest and most prevalent of these myths derives from allegations that MTV’s programming policies were unfairly biased against videos promoting black artists and music. Today, largely as a result of these widespread complaints about the lily white nature of its playlist, MTV may be immune to such criticism; MTV’s current playlists are more racially balanced than in the first half of the decade and “black music” has become one of the network’s most popular offerings.
While MTV may have cleaned up its act since then, the channel’s early playlists were almost completely dominated by white male artists. The problem with the claim that MTV’s programming was unfairly discriminatory lies instead in the choice of MTV as a target for this particular line of critical fire.
Charges of racism, for instance, have dogged rock and roll since the 1950s. Such precedents, however, were largely ignored by MTV’s critics in their rush to mark the channel with the “Racist!” brand, despite the fact that MTV’s primary line of defense pointed directly at existing discriminatory practices within the music industry as a whole. The network argued that its programming was patterned on the formats of rock radio stations, and that, like rock radio, the network’s decisions to air particular songs were always based on questions of genre (“Is it rock and roll?”) rather than race (“Is it white?”).
This defense was by no means an airtight one. Many critics questioned MTV’s definition of the rock genre, while others pointed out that MTV’s practices weren’t any less offensive simply because other cultural institutions behaved in an equally discriminatory fashion. Nevertheless, the network’s response to its critics should not be dismissed so casually. While it is certainly true that MTV’s practices weren’t justified simply because “everyone else does it,” the network’s defense is a valid assessment of the discriminatory practices of the popular music industry as a whole.
With this in mind, it becomes harder to interpret the anti-racist attack on MTV as a natural reaction to an offensive set of policies. This is not to argue that MTV was necessarily innocent of the charges against it, but rather that the network was unfairly singled out as a scapegoat for (and by) the industry. Through the most heated moments of the critical assault on MTV, there was not so much as a hint of an outcry against the related and equally discriminatory practices of other facets of the popular culture industry out of which MTV’s policies grew. It is this failure of critics to connect MTV’s policies with those of related forms of popular culture, rather than the inaccuracy of the charges against the network, which is at the heart of the “MTV-as-racist” myth.
By contrast, the myth of music television as a destroyer of viewers’ imaginations is rooted in a gross misconception of the medium’s effects, a misconception which itself grows out of critics’ failure to recognize music television’s recombinant nature. Kinder’s account of this argument is a particularly vivid one:
One of the most compelling aspects of rock video is its power to evoke specific visual images in the mind of the spectator every time one hears the music with which they have been juxtaposed on television. The experience of having watched and listened to a particular video clip on television establishes these connections in the brain circuitry; by repeating the experience very frequently within a short period of time (a situation guaranteed by the repetitive structure of MTV), the spectator strengthens these associations in the brain. Thus later when the spectator hears the song on the radio or in a different context in which the visuals are absent, the presence of the music is likely to draw these images from memory, accompanied by the desire to see them again. This process follows the basic patterns of conditioning well established in the field of cognitive learning.
Thus, not only does music video fix the meanings of songs for its audience, but this insidious form of dictatorial control actually brainwashes unsuspecting viewers into having addictive cravings for still more music videos. Contrary to Kinder’s claims, however, the addition of visual information to the audio text of a popular song, as both Acland and Goodwin have pointed out, is likely to make the text’s meaning more ambiguous, as such details may expand or confuse, rather than limit or clarify, the possible interpretations of a text.
The problems with this myth, however, run deeper still. The argument that the visual elements of a music video necessarily dominate the musical soundtrack assumes that it is the video which serves as the primary site where the musical text and its audience meet. Music television is neither the first nor necessarily the most common site where such encounters occur. Its mushrooming growth notwithstanding, MTV’s audience is still limited by the reach of the cable television industry, which pales in comparison to the penetration both of radio stations and retail outlets for pre-recorded music.
The implicit counter-thrust to my argument so far is that the power of video lies less in its quantitative prominence on the musical terrain than it does in the qualitative force accruing to it from its visual nature. Music television imposes the stronger force of visual imagery upon the delicate sanctity of a purely aural experience, thus overpowering both the soundtrack and the listener’s power to create his or her own mental images to accompany that soundtrack.
Imbedded in this argument, however, is the problematic assumption that the rise of music television has added harmful visual stimuli to a previously non-visual medium. More importantly, however, it is necessary to remember that the sounds of popular music have always been intimately bound up with various sights. Prior to MTV, album covers, photo spreads in the rock and pop press, films, concerts, and television appearances all served to provide visual accompaniment to the musical sounds made on stage and in the studio. The controversy over Elvis’ 1956 television appearances, for instance, did not stem from his choice of music as much as it did over the televised images of his gyrating hips. Music television did not invent “the look” for popular music, nor did it add a visual importance to a medium which had previously been sight-less; it merely provided another outlet for the dissemination of those sights.
The third and perhaps most common misconception permeating the discourse on music television concerns the demographics of MTV’s audience. Much of what has been written about the network has operated under the assumption that MTV is produced for and consumed by an audience comprised almost exclusively of teenagers. At best, arguments based on this assumption use these demographic “facts” as a justification for the scientific study of MTV. At worst, this notion provides critics with a moralistic soapbox from which they can rail about the horrors being perpetuated upon impressionable youth by a callous and profit-centered pop culture industry.
From either perspective, however, the assertion that the primary audience for MTV is teenagers is never adequately supported with actual evidence. While some critics attempt to back up this myth with numbers, they typically do so unconvincingly:
Critics are concerned especially about the content of the videos because the audience is composed primarily of adolescents, and even younger children also may be watching. Audience surveys have found that 83 percent of the MTV audience is 12 to 34 years old.
That the vast majority of MTV’s audience falls into the 12-34 age range is scarcely adequate support for the claim that the audience is primarily adolescents.
There are two “obvious” possible reasons for this misconception. The first of these is the problematic practice of reading the demographic characteristics of MTV’s audience from the network’s programming content. This practice is flawed not only because of the wide variety of audiences the network seems to address, but because reading the audience off of any text is always a chancy business. The second and more common explanation for the perpetuation of this myth stems from the mistaken notion that only teenagers listen to popular music. Rock and roll, some critics argue, is an adolescent fixation which a normal child will eventually grow out of. The claim that popular music and adulthood are mutually exclusive entities, however, is not only highly elitist in its stance towards popular culture, but it also fails to take into account the fact that significant numbers of adults do, in fact, listen to rock and roll.
Significantly, those critics who recognize the recombinant nature of music television not only fail to see the medium as a form of youth culture, they recognize it to be a site where the very notion of “youth” is struggled over:
Whoever MTV addresses it can’t be “youth” as defined by rock and roll. . . .The rise of pop video has, in fact, been dependent on (and accelerated) the decline of the ideology of youth-as-opposition. . . .Rock, too, has become a form of domestic entertainment.
What far too many critics have failed to see is that popular music can no longer (if it ever could) be understood as “belonging” to a particular generation of listeners; its audience is too fragmented and diverse to be reduced to a specific set of age-based demographics.
The fourth and final myth I wish to discuss here is that of music television (and especially MTV) as the ultimate commodification of rock music. MTV, the argument goes, is the epitome of the growing trend towards commercialized, commodified, and corporatized music. “Rock,” it is argued, “has wed itself to video, acquiescing to the burgeoning industry belief that success lies not in artistry, not in music, but in marketing a product to the proper psychographic.”
That music videos are advertisements for particular songs, albums, and artists is hard to deny: MTV and its cousins are profit-motivated, commercial-sponsored vehicles for disseminating videos. The problem with this notion is, once again, not that it is incorrect to see video as a marketing tool, but that the argument carries with it the problematic assumption that, prior to the rise of music television, rock and roll was a “pure,” non-commercialized art form which MTV has managed to sully with its profit-minded ways. Rock, however, has always been a commodified product, and critics who claim that music television somehow “sells out” rock and roll fail to recognize that the music has been packaged and sold as a commodity since its birth. Sam Philips, for instance, is often quoted as having said, “If I could find me a white man who had the Negro sound and Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” Though he didn’t make a billion dollars from his “discovery” of Elvis, it bears emphasizing here that Philips’ desire was a profit-centered one: he was not looking to revolutionize the aesthetics of popular music (even if he ultimately helped to bring such changes about), he was trying to run a profitable business.
None of my refutation of the “commodification myth” is intended to imply that MTV has not helped to change the ways in which rock and popular music are packaged and sold. However, to critique music television as the root cause of the problem fails not only to recognize that “the problem” predates MTV by several decades, but that rock and roll is necessarily a commodified form of popular culture. To hold music television accountable for selling out rock and roll, then, is to fail to recognize the medium’s musical roots, and the history of commodification those roots carry with them.
At the heart of the four myths discussed above lies the problematic tendency to examine music television from too narrow a perspective, a failure to recognize the ways in which music television recombines other forms of popular culture into a unique form of its own. The difficulty with such approaches to music television is that they attempt to simplify their object of study by reducing it to a smaller, more manageable question, a simplification which inevitably and necessarily serves to limit (if not invalidate) the conclusions ultimately reached.
One might argue that while individual examples of approaches which “flatten out” the recombinant complexity of music television into a one-dimensional image of music television as an isolated offshoot of a single medium are not useful by themselves, the aggregate total of such work, particularly if represented by a sufficiently diverse set of approaches to the topic, will provide us with the desired broader perspective on the subject. Examining the subject from three (or five or twenty) different perspectives and then somehow triangulating from the resulting fragments fails to account for the constant interplay between the various levels at which we choose to investigate music television. As Grossberg puts it,
the complexity of music television is defined by the particular links it builds and builds upon, between economic, textual, and communicative practices, historical relations, and subjective identities and experiences.
It is these links between diverse sets of practices which provide us with a richer understanding of music television, but which have all too often been lost amidst the sea of monolithic approaches to the subject.
As critics wishing to understand the subject of music television, our task is more complex than it has typically been seen to be. We must approach the subject of music television nomadically, moving onto its terrain from all of its “multiple entryways” simultaneously, examining it, not as an offshoot of a single medium, but as a site where other cultural forms intersect and interact. The recombinant nature of MTV necessitates an equal degree of mobility on the part of the critic who wishes to escape the myth-strewn paths of previous research and move towards a richer understanding of the role music television plays in our culture.