MTV and the death of democracy

By Carl 

It was thirty years ago today, Robert Pittman taught the band not to play.

MTV launched on August 1, 1980, and literally changed the face of music forever, although you wouldn't know it from the first video, "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, a band composed of Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes, both later joining Yes. In the video, the lighting and the costuming and set were all designed to be particularly unflattering to a band whose members were not exactly Hollywood star-material.

OK, so Downes was not ugly, but... did you know that "Video" charted at #444 years before MTV used it?

I digress.

The immediate impact of MTV's popularity was the development in earnest of the music video. Prior to the launch, artists since the 1960s created promotional films for top 40 songs, sometimes even albums. The first true "music video" was for "Surf City" by Jan & Dean in 1964. The later Beatles' albums featured several of these, which were distributed to variety shows worldwide so that "The Beatles" could make an appearance on the show.

These were mostly performance clips of the band, although with the release of Sgt. Pepper, The Beatles went a little avant garde with theirs.

More and more, bands provided short films for their record companies to show in movie theatres, on television variety shows and to various conferences and conventions to promote a band's music.

The music. Not the band. MTV changed that.

I noticed this over the weekend while watching an old Journey video for the song "Seperate Ways," and realizing, damn! That band was uggggggggggleeeeee! The song was released in the MTV generation, to be sure, but the band predates it.

No longer was it enough to be able to sing or play an instrument and/or write a song. Now you had to have "it." You had to be good-looking enough to wet panties and cause wet dreams worldwide. Or, failing that, you had to hire a really expensive and really creative producer to set up your video so it featured really pretty men and women. That means money and that means your record sales and music were beholden to the suits at the label. There was corporate rock before MTV (hello, Monkees!), but the visual aspect and the brand spanking new markets it opened up to songs made corporate rock inevitable.

There weren't bands anymore. They became brands. Brands, the goal of so many people in the blogosphere and even Blogtopia (© Skippy).

Sure, there were exceptions and parodies, most notably "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits, but these were few, far between, and badly needed.

Corporate music begets a bland, pablum of ear candy designed and honed over the years to not offend but to not excite either. It's meant to not make you think: no longer did you have to ponder the lyrics to a song. All you had to do was turn on MTV and voila! Some suit had decided what the song means to you. It moderates everything. There is no radicality except in small pockets of outliers who never really gain acceptance in the mainstream.

To me, it's no surprise that we haven't had another Beatles since MTV. Nor have we had a significant new direction in music since punk, pre-1981. Sure, there was rap, but rap rose without the benefit of MTV and the moment MTV got its hands on it, that was the death knell for bands with a point, like NWA. It stopped being about the music and started being about the heavy rotation.

We all started listening to the same things. Maybe not identical, but all the same things in form. We all needed like-minded entertainment.

It gets worse. MTV created an entire new requirement for filmmakers, who had somehow to reconcile movies and TV to the new form of entertainment. No longer could the camera linger on a scene, establishing mood. Two cigarettes burning down in an ashtray meant two people making love. Now that all had to be established immediately and undeniably. You couldn't infer. You had to state. The attention span of America was quickly narrowing and no one wanted to think anymore.

Maybe you've already guessed from the headline where this is going, and maybe you've started to put the clues together. I'm tempted to stop here but like I just said...

MTV gave us reality TV, too. It started with "slice-o'-life" videos depicting the singer/band in a real-world scenario (usually lost love, or famously Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," about teen pregnancy). It moved onto the Real World programs and continues to this day with Jersey Shore. We've become conditioned to accepting, no, demanding a titillating look into people's closets from MTV. We won't accept a thick line between the public persona of someone and their private life. We *know* there's something illegal or illicit or just plain immoral going on behind the scenes that they must be hiding and we want to know, if only to celebrate the fact that, there but for the grace of God, go we.

Birthers are the logical outgrowth of this. Birthers and shrill harpies of the right who find boogeymen in little children camping on an island.

I could probably go on, from talking about how MTV made it possible for fashion to become really pretty crappy to the fulfillment of Andy Warhol's "fifteen minutes of fame" prophesy to any number of terrible impacts on society.

That's not to say MTV has been all bad. For instance, it was MTV that broadcast Live Aid to try and fight famine in Ethiopia, and it was MTV that gave Bill Clinton the youth vote (and probably Barack Obama as well.) And Jon Stewart got his start on MTV and became a nightly treasure on a spin-off of MTV's Ha! channel. I'm sure if I really sat and thought more on it, I could probably balance this post out with more positives.

But that would make this corporate blogging. :-)

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

You forget I'm in America

By Distributorcap

Did you know that the United States doesn't have any rich people? There are no millionaires, no billionaires, no nouveau riche. If you listen carefully to the words of such brilliant orators as Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, they never mention the wealthy, never say anything about the monied class.

If you listen very carefully to the recent speeches from the man of 1,000 chins and the man with the bronzed male member, what we have in the United States are "job creators." Rich people -- puh-leezee, this is America, not the French aristocracy of 1788.

Here is where Anita breaks out into song:

"I like to be in America, Okay by me in America, Everything free in America" -- where Bernardo keenly observes, "for a small fee in America."

You have to give the GOP credit for adherence to the Prime Directive -- the only good public is a stupid and misinformed public. It sure has paid off well for the Job Creator class of America.  Phase 1 began in 1981 with the ascension of the genteel and amiable Lucifer himself, Ronald Reagan, the first step in the nation's climb back to the landed gentry.  Reagan gutted social programs, proclaimed welfare queens drove Cadillacs, declared ketchup a vegetable, stated trees cause pollution, and made education (along with fat tub of lard William Bennett) a very, very evil thing, even more evil than that nasty evil empire with its evil headquarters in Moscow. Phase 2 was ushered in by the creative marketing genius of Lee Atwater. If you are going to lie, cheat, steal, misinform, and mislead to get ahead, make sure you do it consistently and convincingly.  And use lots of video and pictures, like people sitting in a tank.

And the final phase, Phase 3, was the inevitable mainstreaming of the politics of  hate -- it's us vs. them, it's the winner takes all, it's knowing the only good compromise is a non-existent compromise. Using the valuable lessons (or is it lesions) from Phase 1 and Phase 2, the King of Tiffany Despicable himself, Newt Gingrich, marketed Phase 3 into a profitable and influential cottage industry known as Fox News.

Fast forward to 2010 and Social Security (an insurance program everyone pays into) is only known as an "entitlement." (Entitlement is so mainstreamed now it doesn't even register as doublespeak on any scale any more). So is Medicare. But corporate subsidies, economic breaks for oil companies, Big Ag, Big Pharma, defense contractors etc. -- not so much entitlements but "economic engines."

In 2011, we can now add "Job Creators" to the lexicon of a society hastening its descent into a world driven by five-second bytes laced with Orwellian language and insidious totalitarian tactics.

I am no economist, but one day some TV pundit, one who is not as concerned about the theater of the government and as about the governing of the government, is going to publicly state that tax cuts for Job Creators simply do not create one fucking job. Tax Cuts for the class known as Job Creators creates money for Job Creators.

There is really only one thing that creates jobs, and that is demand (Middle English demaunden, Anglo-French demaunder, Medieval Latin dēmandāre) -- period.  Demand for goods and services (do I sound like my Econ 101 professor or what?) creates a need for someone to supply those very needed goods and services. Giving more money to people who already have more money than they know what to do with is just not going to create jobs. Or enough jobs. Yes, it will create a few more gardeners, maids, and nannies and maybe a few mechanics to service the Cadillacs driven by the corporate welfare queens. But millions of jobs for a humming 14 trillion dollar economic engine -- that and a few crumpets will get you dinner with Marie Palinette.

John Boehner and the Man of the 1,000 Chins can ramble on and on and on about how tax increases now are the worst thing ever and that more tax cuts to those billionaires will really, really, really create more jobs (insert red slippers and click 3x). And since mumbling tax cuts (like mumbling entitlements and Job Creators) makes such a melodious soundbite, the great Reagan Uneducated Class (RUC for short), now in their 30s-40s, who were trained well in Atwaterian Marketing and Gingrichian Sociology (or rather sociopathology) - still think that giving the top 1% (who earn 24%of the income) more money will all of a sudden make America the land of milk and honey and paved roads and bullet trains.

Skyscrapers bloom in America

Cadillacs zoom in America (without welfare queens)

Industry boom in America

In 1980, the top marginal tax rate was 70%. In 2005, the top marginal tax rate was under 40%. For the top 1%, after-tax income rose 176% in those same 25 years, while for the bottom 40% it rose just 12%. In 2008, the top 10% on the economic scale held 80% of all the financial assets. Seems equitable, huh?

Can someone please ask Chins, Boehner, Cantor, and even Grover Norquist exactly what jobs those Job Creators are going to create with all that extra money to generate enough demand to get the economy going? Salespeople at Prada and Gucci aren't going to allow America to keep pace with a world more interested in their internal infrastructure than external police actions. Everyone (including teabaggers) knows that tax cuts for the wealth simply cannot create enough (or any) jobs to correct the economy of 300 million Americans. Only creating the demand for real services and industries and goods will.

People (and there are millions) who continue to fall for the continuous Orwellian horseshit being pitchforked by the Republicans simply fail to see that the only jobs those Job Creators are creating are permanent (and cushy) jobs (with a pension and health care for life) for McConnell, Boehner, Cantor, DeMint, and the other assorted lunatics of the GOP. 

Anita: Free to be anything you choose.

Bernardo: Free to wait tables and shine shoes.

The thing is

By Capt. Fogg 

It's not any one thing. It's never one thing. All the things that have led up to my crisis of caring are old things; have been around a long time and I've been aware of all of them all along. Whether things have become so crazy that some trigger point was passed or whether being chronically weak because of a strict diet or a passing virus or whether somehow, the realization that all suffering comes from believing, from having faith that things can ever be all right in the long run, finally seeped through from that repository of things I always say to whatever core of self awareness exists deep down somewhere. 

The thing is -- I just don't care. Neither more or less than the last time I said it, but I don't care. Someone apparently got away with murder? What's it to me? My country is making strides toward being neo-feudal, toward a police state, a corporate oligarchy with no collective concern for anything but maximum profit and maximum exploitation by those who can make the most of it? So what? The great accomplishments of science? That's over, unless it's the science of sales and manipulation and the technology that exists only to make people buy it. I don't give a damn. I don't even give a damn that I don't give a damn and I've forgotten why I ever believed in the progress of man and the slow climb up from the insanity of animals toward enlightenment and civilization -- or even decency. 

But it's always something. 

I got a phone call the other day. It was a recorded voice asking to contribute to the fight against the persecution of Christian parents' rights to raise their families as they saw fit. I have no idea what they meant but I can have some confidence in the assumption that it has to do with interfering with some other group's right to do the same. I pushed the "never call me again" button. I don't care, it's someone else's fight after all, and if they do win, it will take so long they might as well just wait for the next asteroid or gamma ray burst or solar catastrophe. 

I got a flier in the mail, too. Cover photos of grey haired people smiling like they were drugged under a headline of "happy Seniors." Now I hate like hell to be called a "senior," and it damned well is a gratuitous pejorative. I'm still a man and no less entitled to be one than when I was an idiot teenager, fulfilling my duty of buying things to be hip. But no, these happy folks were just in ecstasy because Representative Tom Rooney and his friends Mr. Ryan and Governor "Medicare Fraud" Scott were going to keep Medicare and Social security from being taken over by "unelected bureaucrats" and presumably given over to those entitled by party affiliation to a big Goddamn profit from it. You know, the Republican peerage, the elect. Happy, happy days, but I'm not going to be able to do a damn thing so why worry? 

I bought one of these little flat screen portable HDTV's recently. Figured it would be a good thing for hurricane season, but trying it out today, I was was disappointed to find nothing on the air but Jesus and informercials, but I shouldn't be, of course. That's all there really is in this episode of the Truman Show and all there will be allowed to be because all this amazing technology has no other purpose than to sell to those at the bottom of the pond. The people already borrowing at 400% from Wells Fargo payday loan stores to meet the mortgage payment to Wells Fargo Bank and the credit cards they maxed out at Wal-Mart and who just found out they have to die because they have no insurance and can't even get welfare because they can't pass a drug test because they had to take something for the pain and they can't afford a prescription or prescription drugs. Yes, it's gonna be all right after we 'save' Medicare. 

Some "Practicing physician" as he continually reminded me had the ultimate cure and preventative for heart disease which "we now know" is only caused by "Toxins" that need to be chelated out of our blood stream with his snake oil pills. "I don't wancha getting a bypass. I don't wancha getting a stent." He just wants to sell pills that will stop the "epidemic of sickness overwhelming all of us." It would take more than a pill to stop the irony, but nothing will stop the two born every minute. 

Another channel appeared to be a cooking channel, showing children how to cover apple slices with sugar sprinkles because, as the nice Church lady tells us, "God wants children to eat healthy food" unless of course the fruit contains knowledge of morality. Perhaps that's why so many children are hungry - not enough red and green sprinkles -- or maybe, like me, God doesn't give a shit -- at least not as long as he sells enough air time. And he does sell it. Four stations available on the indoor antenna and three of them have Jesus, or at least so they say. They don't show him, but perhaps he's tied up in the back room while those polyester puffballs strut and parade and chant and solicit money. JEE- Suss! wants you to be rich so buy my prayer towel and my blessing -- call now. 

So why feel sorry for myself. I don't need to if I don't care. I don't feel sorry for America either, they're fed all the crap they can chew on and they will die, or at least make sure you do, rather than make anything better. If I feel sorry for anyone it's people like poor old Jesus who not only thought they could, but tried -- only to be defeated, have their history stolen and used to sell product, to support tyranny and exploitation and persecution, the fleecing of the poor, the fearful, the desperate and to stifle knowledge, damn decency and prostitute hope. 

But who cares? 

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Thoughts on Osama bin Laden's porn stash and American freedom

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So pornography has been found on those computers taken from Osama bin Laden's hideout. Does this prove his hypocrisy? Yes, if it was his, but, even if it was, I'm not sure it's such a shocking revelation. Would we really be surprised to learn that Osama didn't always live up to his extremist ideals?

Sure, he criticized the West for its lax morals and open sexuality, but hypocrisy aside, was he wrong? Consider, without prejudice (if possible), what he once wrote to the American people:

Your nation exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools, calling upon customers to purchase them. You plaster your naked daughters across billboards in order to sell a product without any shame. You have brainwashed your daughters into believing they are liberated by wearing revealing clothes, yet in reality all they have liberated is your sexual desire.

I realize it's not a popular to defend anything about the man, but was he wrong about this? I remain committed to liberal principles and to a liberal way of life, including the liberation of sexual desire and freedom to express ourselves however we please, but I am also troubled by the exploitation of women and sexualization of children that are polluting our culture and interfering with the mature, reasoned expression of our liberty.

This is a far more important issue than Osama's alleged hypocrisy. But try telling that to the media, which prefer titillation to any sort of mature, rational discussion of sexuality and, more broadly, of American and Western culture.

Another visit from Captain Obvious: Song lyrics getting more narcissistic and hostile

By Carl

Song lyrics are becoming more and more narcissistic:

Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and the expression of positive emotions.

"Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before," Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.

Defining the personality of a generation with song lyrics may seem a bit of a reach, but Dr. DeWall points to research done by his co-authors that showed people of the same age scoring higher in measures of narcissism on some personality tests. The extent and meaning of this trend have been hotly debated by psychologists, some of whom question the tests' usefulness and say that young people today aren’t any more self-centered than those of earlier generations. The new study of song lyrics certainly won’t end the debate, but it does offer another way to gauge self-absorption: the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The researchers find that hit songs in the 1980s were more likely to emphasize happy togetherness, like the racial harmony sought by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder in "Ebony and Ivory" and the group exuberance promoted by Kool & the Gang: "Let's all celebrate and have a good time." Diana Ross and Lionel Richie sang of "two hearts that beat as one," and John Lennon's "(Just Like) Starting Over" emphasized the preciousness of "our life together."

Now, all this has to be placed in the context of a culture in which Andy Warhol's "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes" seems surprisingly less of a throw-off absurdity and more of a piquant observation.

Think about it: If you're reading Simply Left Behind, you're reading my blog, which I'm writing because I have a lot to say and all of the Internet to say it in. I get a couple of hundred hits a day. If I were forced to go out and find a publisher, I might sell a couple of hundred books in a lifetime, after getting laughed out of nearly every publisher in town. I'd probably be humiliated into silence (although knowing me, I'd never shut up, but I digress...)

I get to be narcissistic, in other words, because it's available. Similarly, I can display my limited photographic talents on Flickr and Qoop (see sidebar of my blog) or my even more limited talents on YouTube. I'm planning on rolling out a radio station sometime this year... errrr, that's supposed to be a secret between you and me, K? I may even record an album.

None of which will be commercially viable. It's all a vanity project (except my book, but that's a different column.) It's all designed to leave a mark on the culture, however dim and distant it may be.

In a world where 16-year-old girls debase themselves and embarass their families and get pregnant just to have a season on television, where parents will pimp their toddler children out for beauty contests, or subject their brood to the scrutiny of reality television, it's no wonder that song lyrics have become more narcissistic.

It's what sells. It's what creates role models. Ask William Hung, who managed to squeeze a minor sensation out of being a horrible singer of a song that was carefully focus-grouped and overproduced for another factory-made "artist". Or the cast of Jersey Shore, who don't seem to get the fact that the joke is not near them, but is them.

Yes, plenty of great songs are about narcissism, usually in the context of a relationship. I think of The Beatles "In My Life," an overview of a surprisingly mature songwriter who is trying to tell a woman, "Listen, I've gotten laid a lot, but baby, you're the greatest!" Or Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me," perhaps the original "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar."

And perhaps this trend is part of why music sucks lately. Certainly, it feeds into the mass culture of "I got mine, Jack" that gave rise to the Teabaggers (thanks a lot, emo!). If we can't have a great anthem to mass participation like "All We Are Saying (Is Give Peace a Chance)" because we're writing songs about "Fuck you, you're losing me," then how in the hell can we gather around a movement and progress?

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)