MTV Get off the air! Now! (MTV Hits)

Member Name: Ian Proudfoot

Product:	MTV Hits
Date:	12/06/01 (235 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None

Disadvantages: Controlled mass media, conformity, style over content

Do you like advertising? Do you watch TV for the gaps in between the scheduled viewing? Do you like your music sanitised and pre-packaged? Do you have faith in the myth of rock? Is the visual impact of music more important to you than the music itself? Do you have the attention span and memory of a goldfish? Do you like to be sold an ideology in the shape of entertainment?

Then welcome to the world of MTV and it’s benign process of subliminal advertising, media manipulation and the promotion of the corporate view of the spirit of ‘rock n’ roll’.

MTV from its creation in the early 1980’s has promoted itself as a new and radical departure for television. New tactics and methods of TV programming have been tested on MTV. The clear definition of start/finish in TV programming schedules was broken up, replaced by a constant sensory bombardment of images. On MTV programmes bleed into each other congealing themselves in an amorphous mass of organised chaos. On MTV content doesn’t matter just the visual impact of the images on the screen. Don’t worry about missing something It will be repeated again in half a hour. Like a stuck record MTV, repeats itself ad infinitum until the message is rammed home to the viewer.

The normal authority of presenters and newsreaders was undermined by the arrival of the Video DJ (VDJ) a motley collection of half-wits and failed musicians. All talented in one area only, the ability to turn the world shattering event into trivia and the trivial into something profound and groundbreaking. These VDJs from their humble beginnings as ‘soft baseball jacketed jocks’ have metamorphosed into the clean cut pretty things that populate our screens every waking hours. A winning smile and beautiful faces of MTV are the amethyst deceivers of the modern age. The straight teeth in their mouths, being more important than the words that come out of them. The MTV virus has creeped
into all levels of ‘Yoof’ TV, just watch T4 or Alive and Kicking and watch how they clearly imitate the pioneering TV tactics of MTV. The reductionism of TV presenting to image over substance is the ultimate victory of MTV.

If MTV has changed the way in which TV is formatted and presented it has being successful in other ways as well. The first is in turning a TV station into a 24/7 advertising experience. When MTV is not advertising itself by the use of a thousand animations and vocal calls from it’s VDJs. It’s selling the products of the large entertainment conglomerates either by direct advertising or via indirect advertising. This indirect advertising takes the shape of the music videos and interviews that MTV broadcasts.

In pioneering ‘rock video’ MTV has changed the emphasis of making videos from being a form of artistic expression to that of a sales pitch. The massive entertainment corporations hand in hand with MTV have realised that the visual impact and heavy rotational promotion of video will sell more records than other means. Why bother going through the long drawn out process of breaking an act via touring and localised promotion when videos can be transmitted directly into the homes of a populous already hypnotised and sedated by television. No it’s far easier to manufacture a video and serve it like fast food to a captive audience. An audience which will willing consume the additive ridden junk that is thrown at them.

The other main area that MTV has succeeded in is selling an ethos as a lifestyle commodity. Where once music was seen as a dangerous life affirming force, since MTV arrived on the scene it has been, gentifred, repackaged and sold back to the public as short term life style fad rather than an impassioned cause. The corporate entertainment industry hand in hand with MTV has taken all that radical about musical genres and sanitised them. Hip-hop has been transfor
med into bland Rn’B, grunge and metal reduced to a caricature of it’s self, the true rage of Nirvana replaced by the hormone fuelled angst of Limp Bizkit and nu-metal. The radicalism of Punk replaced by the cartoonism of bands like Blink 182. Not content with reshaping once radical music, MTV has also continually pushed the safe bland world of a thousand boy and girl bands into the public domain. Like Disney, MTV portrays a sanitised and safe worldview build around conformity and the American ideal.

MTV is happy with its position, the money is flowing in and audience figures are up. Unless we as consumers are willing to break away from the spell that MTV has cast, it will continue to destroy what is important about music: passion, integrity, ideas and spirit. Replacing them with trivialasation, sound bites, image over content, conformity and money over art. Do yourself a favour, turn off your TV and repeat this mantra “MTV get off the air”. Relax things are fine in a MTV free world.

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