Fredagskrönikor

TREBOKSTAVMULTISARNAS PARAD

CNN, ABC, KTH, AFP, MGM, XTC, OCH GIVETVIS MTV.(En kombination hör inte riktigt hit-
vilken?- resultatet surrar i vår minsta byrålåda.)

Här under en lång blick bakåt för att fånga nuet. I trebokstavsdeltat.

Där nu ryms  också MTG, ABC, DDT och hela
flocken. En ändlös bokstavradda. Som en bilkö in mot en mycket stor metropol.
Här länken till artikeln här under. Du hittar den ute på WWW-nätet.

Tony Slafanis berättelse om tidiga MTV är en bra
text att spjärn emot om man vill fundera på vart
vi styr härnäst.

IRL= In Real Life.

Det finns en bra Ocean därute. Jag lånade ett mindre badkar text från Tony.

Nu länk:
www.furious.com/PERFECT/mtvearlyyears.html  

Till detta:

Early MTV

How the Mild-Mannered Music Channel Became
the Arbiter of Outrageousness
By Tony Sclafani
Imagine combining the simple presentation of a
cable access show with music video clips that
looked like they were inspired by The Monkees TV
series. That’s how the Music Television cable
channel came across when it first appeared in
Aug. 1981. Few people realize it now, but when
MTV started, it presented content that was pretty
much family-friendly.

Yet within two years, the channel began to
realize outrageousness was what really grabbed
the attention of the public, and that changed not
only the musical landscape, but the cultural one
too. MTV’s ”age of innocence” is not something
the channel likes to publicize, as evidenced by
the fact that it totally ignored its 25th
anniversary this past August 1. But it was
revived when VH-1 rebroadcast MTV’s opening day
on the 25th anniversary of the channel’s launch.

Here, we got to see freshly-scrubbed veejays like
Alan Hunter (who looked like he could have
replaced Michael J. Fox on Family Ties) and
Martha Quinn, whose ”new wave” get-up looked
retro even then.

Then there were the videos. These were clips of
singers simply lip-synching their songs (Pat
Benatar’s ”You Better Run”); live concert clips
(REO Speedwagon’s ”Take It on the Run”); or
primitive concept videos that were usually
humorous (Blotto’s ”I Wanna Be a Lifeguard”) or
contained some elements of camp (The Pretenders’
”Brass in Pocket”).

The closest the opening day’s video lineup got to
anything racy was Rod Stewart’s ”Ain’t Love a
Bitch” (thanks to its title) and Kate Bush’s ”The
Man with the Child in His Eyes,” a sensual clip
in which the English songstress wore a tiny white
outfit.

The inclination after viewing these selections
would be to say they look like The Donna Reed
Show compared to MTV’s current sex-saturated
videos. And indeed they do. But what’s more
revealing is to compare early MTV to other
television shows during that time period. In
1981, the top-rated show was Dallas, a show not
known for shying away from sex and violence.
Other big hits that year were Three’s Company,
Falcon Crest and Love Boat. Guess the suits in
the music industry considered music videos ”kid’s
fare” back then, and didn’t want to inject
mom’n’pop TV sensibilities into youth culture.
That would change.

”Some of those early videos were very corny and
cheesy,” admits Nina Blackwood in a recent
interview for this article, one of MTV’s five
original veejays. ”You didn’t have a lot of
technology; you didn’t have a lot of money to put
into the production.

At its start, Blackwood says, MTV only had around
300 clips. Some videos were already a few years
old, but wound up in major rotation because,
well, what else was there? There was no
competition for airtime amongst artists, so
videos were pretty straightforward affairs. Some
of them were concert clips; others were simply
silly, probably using the aforementioned Monkees
as inspiration. What else was there?

Within these confines, directors still managed to
innovate and do it without the now tried-and-true
shock factor that everyone seems to employ. There
was an elaborate cartoon landscape crafted for
the clip of ”Calling All Girls,” a song by a
session drummer-turned-singer called Hilly
Michaels. The Tom Tom Club also got in on the
cartoon action with a cutesy clip for their dance
club hit ”Genius of Love.” David Bowie’s
”Fashion” employed a masquerade theme and even
featured an appearance from Alan Hunter in his
pre-veejay days (he can be seen with a prosthetic
nose at 2:19 into the video).

A Wave of Influence

A benchmark of sorts was reached when the veteran
J. Geils Band’s ”Centerfold” video went into
”heavy rotation” on MTV. The clip was arguably
the first video to help propel a song into the
Number One position (where it stayed for six
weeks). It was also slightly risquÈ in its use of
the now tried-and-true ”schoolgirl” get-up used
by the models. The success of ”Centerfold” was
unprecedented for the group.

The Go-Go’s showed that an all-female rock band
was commercially viable when their live video of
the ”We Got the Beat” garnered major airtime. As
MTV itself caught on, this video gave the
year-old song a second life and it became a
Number Two hit in early 1982. This song
represents perhaps the first ”MTV hit” by an
untested group.

Considering the musical landscape of early 1982
(sappy pop, corporate rock and pop-country) it’s
doubtful that the new wave Go-Go’s would have
become pop sensations without MTV. FM radio had
long ignored former Runaway Joan Jett, but when
her video for ”I Love Rock’n’Roll” began to
generate attention on MTV, radio followed suit
and the song also went to Number One.

MTV’s willingness to play videos by untested
artists was what endeared it to music fans at the
time. For fans of alternative music, it was an
exciting time. Finally, someone was taking
notice. Even one of MTV’s harshest critics, the
Chicago Sun-Times’ Jim DeRogatis, found himself
mesmerized at the outset.

”I was a music geek, and I was curious to see
what these bands were doing in this video
format,” DeRogatis says. ”I was the sort of guy
who would stay up and watch Midnight Special (a
’70’s late-night TV series featuring live
performances). Whenever any band was on TV at all
in the mainstream media it was exciting. I’d go
to a friend’s house and sit there for hours at a
time (watching).”

”The first year of MTV was pretty much all
experimental, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants,”
Blackwood points out. ”There was no prototype
that we could really follow. It was really kind
of a free for all – throw stuff on the wall and
see what sticks. And that actually was I thought
the cool part about it.”

At the time, MTV was said to have reached a mere
300,000 to 500,000 viewers, and since the world
wasn’t watching (yet) the company was able to
experiment. Blackwood notes that the station
wasn’t even broadcast in the section of New York
where the studios were located.

”You have to remember cable was in its infancy,”
she explains. ”We were sent around the country
like little ambassadors and salespeople to meet
with the owners and operators of the local cable
channels.”

By way of contrast, MTV is now broadcast into
89-90 million homes and has 9000 videos available
at any given time, according to spokesperson
Graham James.

Commercialism at Work

By the middle of 1982, record companies had
started to get hip to MTV’s influence. The
British teen pop band Haircut 100 was featured in
a variety of videos that showed them in faux
jungle and beach settings. Other British groups
like Bananarama and Fun Boy Three embraced the
teenybopper aesthetic with videos that showed the
bands with cardboard props. These videos were as
cute and silly as ever. The Australian band Men
at Work and the British synth pop group A Flock
of Seagulls became the first ”MTV bands,” because
their visual gimmicks were more
attention-grabbing than their music.

But it took British popsters Duran Duran (who
were U.S. chart failures in 1981) to make videos
into a pseudo ”art form,” with their
professionally filmed clips for the songs ”Rio”
and ”Hungry Like the Wolf.” The exotic locales,
oddball camera angles and high cheekbones of the
band members made Duran Duran into the first
video ”stars.” Their videos also gave directors
license to impose techniques usually used in film
(symbolism, fast-paced editing, lots of female
flash) to videos.

”About two years into MTV, people were seeing
that these video things really are taking off and
record companies were putting more money into
it,” Blackwood recalls. ”There were people
writing storyboards with more serious story lines
for the songs.”

”Like everything else ñadvertising and other wise
- visuals are sex-driven,” says Danny Sheridan, a
music industry veteran and Blackwood’s longtime
manager. ”A lot of guys that were making those
videos were from the advertising field and knew
that sex sells.”

British bands like the Human League underscored
their electronic music with moody videos that
were less impressive when mimicked by less
talented artists. Elvis Costello commented on the
increasingly pretentious style of videos in a
1983 issue of Musician, saying recent English
videos were all starting to ”look like ëMurder on
the Orient Express.’”

In her 1994 book Hole in our Soul, writer Martha
Bayles laments this intrusion of European art
sensibilities into what was essentially an
American art form, the popular song. And this is
where MTV’s history starts to get sticky.

By late 1982, the channel was no longer a
novelty, throwing out oddball songs before middle
America. It had become a publicity machine, and a
slick one at that. New artsy videos gave pop
music a pseudo-seriousness it had never had. This
would result in both rock and pop music embracing
irony and symbolism as it never had before.
Emotional immediacy and sincerity became
secondary.

As for MTV being a mere publicity machine, well,
according to DeRogatis that had been the
intention all along. Fans just didn’t realize it.

”It was bought and paid for by the major labels
and it was all politics,” DeRogatis notes. Some
fans saw the video form itself as flawed, since
it placed image over substance. One such critic
was New Jersey’s Paula Carino, whose letter to
the editor about the subject was featured in the
March 1982 issue of Trouser Press magazine.

”Because of the marvels of video, the rich people
in my school who have MTV cable know who the
Go-Go’s are and what they look like,” wrote
Carino. ”In a few days they’ll forget. What a
wonderful art form.”

Controversy as Commerce

MTV hit an early adolescence in early 1983 when a
long forgotten video broke down the taboo against
performers being overtly sexual (any flesh seen
in early clips was sporadic and incidental). The
video that arguably changed everything was by
Missing Persons, a band comprised of former Frank
Zappa band members. Their video to ”Words”
showcased female singer Dale Bozzio clad in a
barely-there outfit with a top that she described
as ”fishbowls on my tits.” Even by today’s
standards, the video looks shocking.

Soon after, the Los Angeles electro-pop group
Berlin released ”Sex (I’m AÖ),” a frankly sexual
song with a video that showed singer Terri Nunn
in bed and in a nightgown. This adult-oriented
approach had never been done before. Soon it
would become the norm. MTV was only 18 months old
when the Berlin video surfaced. Within a few
months, the kittenish sensuality of Pat Benatar
seemed positively old hat. Skin was in; subtlety
was out. Radio was slower to embrace this change
and neither Missing Persons nor Berlin charted
high with either of these songs (”Words” got to
Number 42 and ”Sex” topped out at Number 62).

When deliberate outlandishness began to replace
harmless fun in videos, a new sensibility began
to evolve amongst critics and audience members.
Critics of most genres had always judged
”innovation” in terms of breaking down social
barriers, but this had only been one benchmark.
Neither Brian Wilson nor Barbra Streisand, for
example, set out to shock people, yet both were
considered innovators.

Yet once MTV’s influence began to expand, the
idea of ”pushing the envelope” became the main
standard upon which critics would judge artists.
Of course, pop music had always pushed barriers,
whether it was Elvis’ hips, The Beatles’ hair, or
Janis Joplin’s entire persona. Nothing wrong with
that. But with the domination of video, the
sideshow elements of any given act became the
main attraction. Artists who come of age now are
reduced to either having to participate in a
freak down or devise elaborate ways of working
around it.

In the Sept. 1983 edition of Trouser Press,
”Media Eye” columnist Karen Schlosberg had made
mention of the channel’s ”blatantly offensive
content,” citing ”women in tight leather (and)
violence” as problems. By Dec. 1983 Schlosberg
had developed a rating scale, where she judged
videos based on ”Gratuitous Sex & Violence” (the
highest ratings-grabber was the electronic metal
band Ministry who Schlosberg called ”nasty and
vicious”).

Rock fans might have expected such admonitions
coming from mainstream publications or
conservative pundits. But the fact that the barbs
were coming from rock magazine writers meant that
MTV was having an effect on society that
straddled the usual left-right,
progressive-conservative bickering.

Rather than fight such criticism, MTV’s brass
learned that no publicity is bad publicity,
especially with an audience mainly comprised of
teens. Before long, MTV was showcasing Madonna
writhing on the floor in a wedding dress and
heavy metal groups doing God-knows-what. By late
1983, its age of innocence was over.

Tipper Gore’s Parents Music Resource Center
campaign that was launched in 1984 was one
reaction to pop music’s new overtly visual sexual
exhibitionism. Gore said she started the advocacy
group after reading the lyrics to a Prince song
her daughter was playing (”Darling Nikki”). But
it’s doubtful a few lyrics would have inspired a
political movement had the culture not moved into
R-rated territory.

”It was always pandering to the lowest common
denominator,” DeRogatis says of MTV. ”And it all
leads to Jackass and My Super Sweet 16.”

DeRogatis continues: ”Bottom line: MTV is the
single most destructive force in the history of
rock and roll. TV has the Orwellian ability to
show us black and say that it’s white. I think
that’s what was there with MTV to begin with.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Click on this link to see the original MTV
veejays introduce themselves during the first few
moments of the channel’s broadcast:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIr6V41Xm2k  

Click here for a playlist of songs from MTV’s
first day:
www.rhapsody.com/playlistcentral/playlistdetail?playlistId=11084822  

Jag anar hur behovet av en korskulturell kanal verkligen kommer att efterlängtas.
P2 blir P22.?
I bild också? Äventyret forsätter under tiden bildbefriat. Nästan.

Kjell Alinge nätpirat extraordinaire.

ÖVERSVÄMNING I PAPPERSTIGERNS TECKEN

ELDORADO FÖDER LEVANDE UNGAR

Framtid

CYBER TAXI DRIVER
(With thanx to Scorcese & DeNiro.)

FRAMTIDEN STRUNTAR VIDARE I STEREO

HÄR VAR DET FULLSATT ÄNDA UPP I MINSTA MORGONSOFFANS FÅGELHOLK

MANIFEST FÖR PUMPANDE PLANET

MORALENS MARMELAD

BILDERNAS REPRISTID ÄR ALLTID HÄR

KJELL I INTERVJUBÅSET

THE SOUNDS OF SIMON

VÄRLDAR I FICKFORMAT

EVIGA FRÅGOR

DEN NYA MUSIKEN

JAG HAR LÄST MIG SJÄLV HÄR

TRADITION ELLER REVOLUTION?

14 juli 1789, av Decaux.