May 17, 2009
the image-event (introduction excerpt)
sugarhigh! will be posting excerpts from this book over the next several months
....Certainly that is the sense of the video for “Wind of Change”: all news is one news.
The role of the music video in pop music’s imbricated empire around this moment is a profound and puzzling one. Profound because MTV had become in some regard the most crucial venue for pop music; certainly it was the most powerful marketing instrument. And puzzling for much the same reason, given that the video form requires that music to be something in addition to being music — that it pass through a different medium altogether. One can easily see how such a passage could be of use: pictures had been selling pop for generations. But the image’s arrival at the absolute core of the pop music market is nonetheless curious.
Many hands have been wrung over this issue, mostly to the effect of bemoaning the allegedly new requirement that bands be visually appealing rather than musically apt. Despite the evident tradition of image-based marketing, this account of a changed circumstance is difficult to resist; there can be no doubt that MTV’s ascent shaped marketing plans from Los Angeles to London. This ascent began in earnest in 1983, with the so-called “second launch” and entry into major standard cable markets; it steepened in 1986, when the channel opened itself up to a broader range of music (most markedly along racial lines; before that moment, an obdurate cultural apartheid had obtained) and began engendering exclusive agreements with the major labels. By the end of the decade, the road to Number One passed through MTV’s studios — and it was there that pop songs did much of their communicating. This must be reckoned with: there is scarcely a song mentioned in this book that did not have a corresponding video clip in some way suggestive, persuasive, rhetorically loaded.
That said, a more nuanced history of the MTV is needed: of its rise, and the proximate causes and effects. It’s striking, to work backward, that within just a few years, MTV would to abandon the video format altogether and willingly abandon its position as musical kingmaker. In 1992, MTV began airing The Real World, the “reality show” which supplied the dominant format for what would swiftly become, in effect, the world’s most successful documentary network. Music clips ebbed, eventually vanishing altogether.
Why it might be the case, then, that the visual form of the pop song, the pop song as image, should reach its zenith exactly in this historical passage, when pop music was undergoing the upheavals this book considers, before shortly receding? This is a substantial question, but can only be an aside to this book’s inquiry into those changes themselves. The correlation is nonetheless suggestive. Specifically, it suggests the possibility of a shared source that exists beyond the genealogy of pop music in and of itself. To state it plainly, this parallel development proposes that MTV’s domination of the image was less a cause of musical changes (as the purist hand-wringers would have it) than an effect of something else entirely, as we will propose the changes in pop music are effects: the outcomes of a historical dynamic which has a great and particular use for the congealed and singular image-event into which all meanings are bound to collapse.