MTV, or Music Television, turns 10 years old this week. It has been a stormy decade. From the start, the network drew charges of racism: of the first 750 videos played, fewer than 25 were by black acts. Videos like lothario Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” in which identically rouged models slink anonymously, provoked complaints of routine sexism. MTV has also been accused of shrinking young people’s attention spans and killing rock and roll. Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks that MTV has “accelerated the process by which people are more likely to think in images than in logic … That’s bad news for those who believe in democratic discussion.” And clearly, the network is to blame for Milli Vanilli.
In the face of protest, MTV has integrated its programming, adding segments devoted to rap and dance music, and embraced new acts like the Black Crowes or M. C. Hammer before pop radio. But to its critics, that’s just damage control. Like rock and roll in the old days, MTV has driven a wedge between generations. Music videos are essentially commercials for songs, ads posing as programming. To people who grew up with rock as the voice of unfulfilled desire–“I can’t get no satisfaction” or “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues”–this pact with advertising seems heretical. To others it’s progress.
Yes, progress. MTV has changed the way we talk, dress, dance, make and consume music, and how we process information. It created a new breed of visual pop star: Cyndi Lauper, Boy George, Janet Jackson, Madonna. And its reach is growing. In 1985, the network launched VH-l, a sop for older rockers. In the next two years, MTV itself plans to divide into three channels running simultaneously, each catering to a different taste. Already, MTV extends to 40 countries. In September, when Asia gets wired, the network will add 33 more countries. That’s a lot of people watching Madonna grab her crotch.
In many ways, MTV is the rock revolution all over again–alienating the grown-ups, alarming the alarmists, impressing the impressionable to adopt silly hairstyles. Like parents horrified by Elvis’s pelvis in the 1950s, an older generation worries that MTV will seduce their children with its hypnotic sexuality, though the network rejects explicit sexual material. Arguably the first television format not adapted from radio, theater or the movies, MTV brings new visual ideas to light faster than any other medium, embracing high art and trash–selections from Kafka and biker sluts–with equal zest. Artists like Robert Longo and Andy Warhol have made music videos, and avant-garde conceptualists like Survival Research Laboratories and Jenny Holzer have worked for the network. Rock video even rehashes the transgressions of rock music, only for the tube: instead of coming on too loud, MTV is too fast and jumpy; instead of venting raw libido, it makes all of life a cool sexual fetish.
And it pitches those fetishes–along with messages flogging the environment, voter registration, the newest hit record, clothes and a hip lifestyle–in an undifferentiated mesh of hype. Part of the appeal of MTV is that anything can happen next. This is a world without perspective: Paula Abdul dances with a cartoon cat; a clay hammer spurts from Peter Gabriel’s clay head; David Byrne of Talking Heads is a child one minute, a face projected on a house the next. For 16 minutes–the network’s estimate of the average viewer visit–logic takes a break.
MTV is the most electrifying bore on television. Its furious pace and hard sell make near-instant cliches of even the most jarring images. But the mess is intriguing. MTV is a swarm of contradictions–it sells sexism and feminism, environmentalism and conspicuous consumption, arty pretensions and tripe–that are never reconciled. It gives you impossible juxtapositions every time you turn it on. That’s as exciting as rock and roll has been in a long time.
