After watching so much MTV over the last ten years, they can no longer think straight. They have the attention span of a mayfly, as evidenced by their apparent inability to follow the plot of a video clip from beginning to end. Their obsession with visual imagery blinds them to rational discourse. They are unable to distinguish image from reality. Their notion of logical thought is a confused stew of non sequiturs and suppressed middles. Am I speaking of the culturally impoverished, illiterate teens who make up the “MTV generation”? Not at all. I am describing the idiots of MTV analysis.
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Sifting through this display of third-generation philosophizing, it’s hard to know who’s conning whom. MTV, clearly enough, is one of the most intriguing postmodern cons of the 1980s. But while its critics may like to think of themselves as hip ‘n’ critical, or maybe even hypercritical (following recent Parisian fashion), hypocritical is surely closer to the mark. Or is this a strong enough adjective for commentators who berate the supposedly airheaded MTV audience without thinking longer than it takes to input the cliches and modem the copy? The immediacy and newness of MTV is uppermost in many critics’ minds, but which of them has stopped to notice that Club MTV is a direct copy of the 20-year-old Soul Train? And what of the academics who are so concerned about establishing the immediate and superficial nature of MTV, but who apparently have hardly ever paused to listen to the song that underpins the video clip they’re supposed to be analyzing? It does, after all, take a particular kind of superficiality (and I suppose a certain bravado) to pronounce upon one of the most important developments in the music industry over the last decade without using ears.
Because the clips need to sell the songs, they tend to mirror the music that’s being promoted in a variety of ways. As John Walker wrote in his book Crossovers: Art Into Pop/Pop Into Art: “What the makers of music videos discovered was how to provide visual experiences equivalent to musical ones.” This has been evident since at least the 1960s, when directors of promotional film clips provided “psychedelic” sequences to complement the music, and when camera operators on American Bandstand were obliged to zoom in and out frantically to illustrate what was supposedly an exciting musical moment.
MTV watchers should have noticed this in the fall of 1989, when MTV screened a two-hour documentary titled Decade, which won considerable critical acclaim and which firmly announced the arrival of an anti-Reaganite cell inside MTV. Mixing interviews, news segments, songs, and video clips, Decade mounted a savage liberal critique of the 1980s that was a good deal more biting than anything attempted by the softies at the networks.
The modernist concept of “creativity” at work here is instructive, since it precisely reflects dominant ideas about what constitutes “art” in rock, pop, and rap music. For just as its clips visualize a sound track, and just as the repetitive structure of the schedule mirrors how we listen to pop, MTV’s operating philosophy must be synchronized with pop culture. Which is why on-screen VJ presenters are encouraged to go for spontaneity and self-consciousness rather than “professionalism.” And why the VJs draw on rock-and-roll, rather than televisual, conventions in which “feel” is more important than accuracy.
