Sound and Vision

The Music Video Reader

Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, Lawrence Grossberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134869220
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Sound and Vision is the first significant collection of new and classic texts on video and brings together some of the leading international cultural and music critics writing today.
Addressing one of the most controversial forms of popular culture in the contemporary world, Sound and Vision confronts easy interpretations of music video - as promotional vehicles, filmic images and postmodern culture - to offer a new and bold understanding of its place in pop music, television and the media industries. The book acknowledges the history of the commercial status of pop music as a whole, as well as its complex relations with other media. Sound and Vision will be an essential text for students of popular music and popular culture.

Part I
THE CONTEXT OF
MUSIC VIDEOS

1
POPULAR MUSIC AND POSTMODERNISM IN THE 1980s

Will Straw

One of the striking things about recent writing on music video is its pivotal and symptomatic role within a number of disciplinary and theoretical realignments upon the larger terrain of cultural theory. At one level, music television is the latest in a succession of privileged examples invoked in the elaboration of scenarios about the development of the media and culture within late capitalist societies, joining a long list that has included jazz music and advertising. As well, the particular set of theoretical discourses brought to bear on music video signals new alliances and convergences across and within various disciplinary boundaries. It is to a significant extent within studies of music video that the internal crises and territorial disputes which currently mark film theory, television studies, the debate over postmodernism and the sociology of popular music are being foregrounded. Seen from a somewhat different light, recent treatments of music video represent the entry of post-structuralist thought into the American social sciences, where it has converged with sociological concerns and premisses of long-standing (those having to do with the status of mass culture) around the work and ideas of Baudrillard.¹

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:

1. that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);
2. that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretive liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him or her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

In retrospect, these fears seem to have been rooted, less in a specific concern about possible new relationships between sound and image, than in a longstanding caution about the relationship between rock music as a culture of presumed resistance and television as the embodiment of mainstream show business and commercial culture. It may be argued, however, that while the debate over celebrity, authenticity and artifice prominent within Anglo-American rock culture in the early 1980s was in part provoked by issues surrounding music video, it was by no means confined to such issues. In particular, the complex of notions and practices which nourished the British ‘New Pop’ of 1981–3, and which were central to these debates, involved rereadings of popular music’s history and relationship to other cultural forms which went far beyond a response to music video exclusively.²

The more recent wave of writing on music video has come both from those with more elaborate theoretical interests, and from people whose point of departure is an interest in television. The particular appeal of music video here is the extent to which it appears to magnify the characteristic functioning of television in general, itself now regarded as the medium most typical of postmodern culture. One finds within much of this writing the articulation of two themes with long and notorious histories within sociologies of the media and of culture: on the one hand, a view of television as embodying the very structure of knowledge and perception in the latter part of the twentieth century; on the other, a view of youth culture as either the most debased or most resistant of cultural forms.

What follows is organized around these two sets of concerns: the one having to do with music video’s relationship to rock music, and the other addressing treatments of music video within characterizations of postmodern culture.

MUSIC VIDEO AND THE NEW POP MAINSTREAM

The dominant tendency in discussions of music video’s impact on rock music is to exaggerate that impact, and to examine it in isolation from other, perhaps equally significant transformations within Anglo-American rock music and rock culture in the early 1980s. Music video was one of a number of innovations producing major structural changes in the music-related industries during that period, but it is unlikely that it was the most important of these, nor that many of them would not have occurred without it.

The most important of these transformations was the constitution of a new pop music mainstream in North America in the years 1982–3. This mainstream represented the convergence of a number of developments (each involving a partial resolution of problems which the recording industry had recognized since the late 1970s): the rebirth of Top 40, singles-based radio, and with it significant shifts in the relative influence of different music audience groups; an increase in the rate of turnover of successful records and artist career spans; the recovery of the record industry after a four-year slump; and the beginning of music video programming on a national scale.

Together, these developments displaced, if only for a time, what was widely regarded as a permanent structural crisis within the recording industry. By the late 1970s, it was apparent that the objectives of radio broadcasters and record companies were in conflict in important ways: advertisers urged radio stations to pursue audiences (those in their late twenties and older) who were not actively engaged in the purchasing of records, though their overall patterns of consumption made them attractive.³ By the early 1980s, radio stations were dominated by Adult Contemporary (light pop and soul) and country music formats, neither of which had significant reach among those most involved in buying records. At the same time, those stations directed at the core of recordbuyers (those in their late teens and early twenties) were increasingly playing music which was not contemporary or in the charts (the ‘classic’ album-rock of the previous decade), and therefore not contributing to a significant extent to the innovation or turnover of performers, styles and individual records.

The new mainstream of 1982–3 had its roots in two developments on the margins of these overall trends. On the one hand, certain radio stations in highly competitive markets (most notably KROQ-FM in San Diego) found it feasible to target audiences encompassing disproportionate numbers of teens and females, rather than compete for a small segment of the traditionally more attractive audience of young male adults. A combination of the principles of Top 40 radio (reliance on local personalities, a ‘heavy’ rotation of music and constant innovation) with the specific musical styles of British post-punk music (ranging from the electropop of The Human League to the various revivalisms of The Stray Cats, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and so on) proved extremely successful. While this audience was attractive to advertisers only in a highly competitive and fragmented market, it was extremely useful to record companies inasmuch as it responded quickly and enthusiastically to musical innovation and became a significant force in record sales during this period.⁴

The other development, of course, was the emergence of music television. MTV and similar networks were at one level simply the latest in a series of encounters between television and popular music, encounters which had increasingly proved unsuccessful. Historically, the audience group most active in buying new records (males in their late teens and early twenties) is underrepresented within television audiences. While, in absolute terms, that audience was of limited appeal to television advertisers, the traditional impossibility of reaching it at all via television and the precision with which music television networks could target this constituency ensured some level of success. (MTV had as its original target audience the 12–34 age demographic, which overlapped significantly with that for album-oriented rock radio and included a similarly high proportion of males.⁵)

The emergent mainstream of 1982–4 had as its principal original demographic bases a radio audience (that of teenage girls) long regarded within radio broadcasting as insignificant, and a medium (television) which was for the first time able to attract the traditional core audience for rock music. This re-enfranchisement of younger teenagers, and especially adolescent girls, as radio listeners and record buyers should be seen as a crucial factor in the emergence of certain kinds of para-musical practices around the new musical mainstream.⁶ An intensification of the discourses of celebrity around pop music, and the proliferation of fan magazines, pin-ups and other forms of merchandise all signalled the renewed involvement of young adolescents within popular music culture.

At the same time, Anglo-American popular music underwent a process of generic stabilization. Certain formal characteristics came to be found in almost all successful examples of that music, and a mainstream with more stylistic coherence than any, perhaps, since the mid-late 1960s, could be seen to have arrived. The most important of these characteristics was no doubt the restriction of almost all musical practice to the format of the 3–5-minute pop song, but the use of dance-related rhythms and some combination of black-and-white rock idioms were almost equally common. Whereas in the early 1980s the pop/rock charts had consisted of heterogeneous, eclectic groupings of styles and forms,⁷ by 1983–4 they had come to manifest an almost unprecedented degree of homogeneity.

The most common way in which these developments have been understood is in terms of a narrative of recuperation: the new mainstream is seen to have enacted, for major record companies, the long-desired co-optation of the critical gestures and innovations of punk, its integration within the mechanisms of celebrity turnover and pop-chart homogeneity.⁸ The appeal of this narrative lies in its fidelity to the dominant conceptions of rock culture’s politics: conceptions positing a dialectic or struggle between margin and mainstream, resistance and complicity.

What this account most obviously overlooks is the extent to which this emergence of a new mainstream had little to do with the life-cycle of punk/new wave, and much to do with certain structural changes within the production of rock music and the mechanisms through which it is disseminated and promoted. While the increased popularity of British acts within the new American mainstream is a significant phenomenon within the recent history of the recorded music industry, it itself may be viewed most profitably in terms of the ongoing negotiation of a relationship between white rock music and black-based dance music. The historically significant tensions and processes of incorporation within American popular music over the last decade, I would argue, are those between an album-based, predominantly white rock music and the idioms and institutional functioning of dance music. It is this relationship which is crucial to a useful historical understanding of the period in which music video came to assume importance, and to an account of change within the functioning of the music-related industries. Within these developments, the trajectories followed by punk music are of secondary importance, despite the extent to which they are privileged within most historical accounts.

The most important of these changes, I would argue, are (a) an increase in the rate of turnover of acts and records, and general intensification of the velocity of rock music and rock culture; (b) the resurgence of the 45-rpm single and the individual song as the basic units within the marketing of rock music; and (c) changes in the function of celebrity and performer identity within rock culture. Within each of these changes, the introduction of music video is one of a number of determinant factors.

Velocity

By the late 1970s, various mechanisms within the music-related industries had slowed down considerably. The elapsed time between albums by major artists was long, resulting in regular complaints about the shortage of new products. The markers of change and development within individual careers were infrequent, as the time spent on the charts by each successful record stretched into one to two years, and sales of several hundred thousand copies became virtually necessary to justify rapidly rising production costs. The time between recording was frequently taken up with lengthy, time-consuming tours, themselves necessary components in the successful promotion of an album.⁹ For the album-rock mainstream, neither AOR radio, increasingly reliant on playlists with a high proportion of ‘classic’ tracks of the decade, nor Top 40, which played singles subsequent to their release on albums, constituted effective channels for innovation.

This slowing down was not limited to certain measurable processes (recording, touring, etc.). Affected as well was the extent to which, for the radio listener or recordbuyer, monitoring the turnover of music was useful and significant for the marking of cultural or social distinction. As I have suggested elsewhere, the album-rock culture of the 1970s was one dependent upon a specific relationship to the passage of time: one in which records and songs from the previous ten years accumulated as acceptable musical resources of the present, rather than functioning as ‘oldies’ with specific reference to a highly calibrated succession of historical moments.¹⁰

In periods of little or slow innovation, the stratification of audiences according to the extent of their familiarity with new products obviously is limited. This slowing down of the velocity of innovation in the late 1970s accompanied the ageing of the core rock audience and its movement out of the age-ranges in which it is most involved in the purchasing of recorded music and in what might be called emblematic uses of rock music and information about it.¹¹

This ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE CONTEXT OF MUSIC VIDEOS
• PART II: MUSIC AND TELEVISION
• PART III: VIDEO ANALYSIS
• PART IV: CONCLUSION