MTV
MTV, launched on August 1, 1981, was the first music video channel. In a few years after its launch, this American cable television network based in New York City, grew into a dominant and influential force in the development of the music industry.
For the first time, young people could watch music videos by their favorite artists or discover new ones 24/7. Particularly the success of Michael Jackson's Thriller made every record company aware that, in order to make their single releases hits, they needed to give each one of them accompanying music video, preferably as sensational as possible. Within a few years, MTV had become a global phenomenon and an entire generation couldn't imagine music without some video attached to it. Naturally, it became very easy to make the music video the prime marketing tool to popularize hairstyles, fashions, dance moves and intrigueing imagery. Any artist or band who couldn't afford or refused to jump on this bandwagon had a far greater challenge ahead.
Apart from their music videos, MTV was also known for broadcasting regular TV shows, like their annual award programs, the MTV Video Music Awards, experimental animated shorts and animated comedy series Beavis and Butt-head, Daria and Celebrity Death Watch. By the early 1990s, they also started broadcasting reality TV shows, like MTV - The Real World, and by 2002 The Osbournes (with Ozzy Osbourne). By the mid-2000s, MTV slowly but surely devoted less airtime to music videos in favor of reality TV shows. As of today, it is basically a reality TV show channel aimed at young audiences.
Links with Zappa
Zappa criticized MTV and the influence it had on making images more important than the music itself. Be In My Video is a vicious satire of MTV. During the version of Trouble Every Day on Does Humor Belong In Music?, Zappa sang: "Well, I'm about get sick from watchin' MTV / I been checkin' out the HO HO HO! / until my eyeballs fail to see / I mean to say that every day is just another rotten group (right you are, girl) / and when it's gonna change, my friend / will probably make you stoop, I don't know." He also criticized MTV in his Z-Pack - PMRC Letter (1984). The show "Yo! MTV Raps" is referenced in This Ain't CNN.
Despite his criticisms one of his concerts have been shown on MTV (like the Halloween 81 concert of 81/10/29-11/01 New York NY US Palladium). Zappa has also been interviewed a few times on MTV, like in 1984 and 1986 ("My Pet Theory"). Zappa's Night School concept would've involved MTV too, but it never came fruition. Both Moon and Dweezil appeared as veejays for the channel during the 1980s. Interviewed by David Fricke for Rolling Stone (1986), Zappa defended Dweezil's success as a MTV VJ: "If his fan mail is any indication, they got the right guy for the job. The thing that's cool about Dweezil is he's just turned seventeen. He IS a kid. He's not a guy pretending to be a kid. He's the age of the audience, and he's a genuine music fan. He knows something about the groups he's putting on. And he also knows them as individuals. The little stories he tells don't come off like showbiz stories."
Beavis and Butt-head was a MTV show Zappa liked.
Zappa about MTV
"Problem with these new video bands is that you can listen to a good record hundreds of times, while watching most videos, you’re bored with them after three times. Images of venetian blinds, and all that crap … it’s stupid. It’s done to death, and the print media just backs it up. And it tells all the young kids that don’t know any better that this is what real life is all about. One of the problems that video’s created for promoters and people who do live shows is they'll hire a video act that may have a hot video, and then the band goes on stage and they can’t play a fuckin’ show. They can’t do it. A lot of the times, the people who have spent the money to go and see these bands find out that there is no entertainment involved. They’ll be looking at four or five guys up there, who’ll be wearing nice clothes, but they haven’t the faintest idea of what to do with a musical instrument or how to entertain an audience. A lot of these groups go out with their shows on tape. Okay, so they’re not even playing their songs. They may actually sing, but their instrumental stuff is actually on tape. (...) One of the reasons people have been turned away from going to live concerts is, especially the younger audiences, they see a group on MTV and go 'Boy, look at their hair! Let's go see them!' And they go there and hear something they hate, and they've just been ripped off for $15." - Frank Zappa in Zappa Dishes It Out, interview by Roger Dakotah, Public News, 12 December 1984. [1]
"As far as appearing on MTV, that is tied mostly to the way you look and, of course, a certain amount of promotional consideration. And the fact is, the videos are so expensive to make, one video costs more than a whole album. I'm self-financed, so I can't afford to spend a lot of money doing these things." - Frank Zappa On... The '80s Guitar Clone, Dan Forte, Guitar Player, January 1987.
"Take a look at what happens at a live performance now. When was the last time you went to see a band, and what you saw was a band? Basically, all of the big groups, so-called, are out there faking it with half the show on tape and people hopping around, kind of lip-syncing to the track. This is because people see acts on MTV and they go to a concert and they expect they're going to get the same result, and of course the only way to do it is to fake it. (...) A lot of that music may have been put together one track at a time, and the guys may in fact have trouble playing a solo with any sustained intensity for 32 bars at a stretch. Well, it's not just the solo. It's the whole way the orchestration sounds. What you hear on television is very, very freeze-dried. The resemblance between the modern-day rock and roll record and what a band actually sounds like is ... well, there is no comparison. I mean, kids have grown up to imagine that a drum set sounds only a certain way, and what they're hearing as a drum set probably isn't a drum set anyway. It's a machine. So it often comes as a shock when you find out what drums really sound like, and what a bass really sounds like, or what anything really sounds like, because they haven't been exposed to the real deal, which is not to say that they would even like the real thing or prefer it to what they get on MTV." Frank Zappa, - Jim Aikin, Bob Doerschuk, Sample This!, Keyboard, February 1987.
"I'm not crazy about the stuff they have on MTV; it's not much to listen to. But some of the pictures are nice." - Frank Zappa, interviewed by Rick Davies, Father Of Invention, Music Technology, February 1987.
- "MTV has a certain look, because it has a limited pictorial vocabulary. All the videos are made up of certain icons. If you don't work in that vocabulary, then the MTV audience doesn't perceive it as a real video. (...) ecord companies have made a major mistake. MTV came along and they thought, "Oh! this is it. We're no longer going to make records" – those little plastic things that people listen to? – "What we're going to do, we're going to sign groups that look like models, so that they can have a video on MTV." The down side of this is the record companies are now totally at the mercy of MTV – that's their main outlet. How many videos can they show on MTV? Not that many. This limits the opportunity for people who actually play music. To play music, because you're not going on MTV unless you belong on MTV; furthermore, you're probably not going to get a record contract unless the guy at the record company thinks you look good." - Zappa's Inferno, Noë Goldwasser, Guitar World, April 1987.
- "The other problem is that when MTV first came along, every major record company looked at it as if it was going to be the thing that would save their lives. It was like they forgot about music and started signing models. MTV should be called "Model TV" instead of Music TV, because it has more to do with the way people look. The mistake the record companies made when they stopped thinking about "how good is the song?" as opposed to "what does the group look like?" is that they geared up for a whole different type of merchandising: everything based on physical appearance. The problem with this type of merchandising is that there's only one game in town. There's only one MTV, and their playlist is not that long. Whereas, if a record company had stuck to the idea of making music, you've got tens of thousands of radio stations all over the United States, any one of them capable of breaking a hit. Their odds were actually better for hits before they went pictorial. And I think they ought to re-assess their commitment to non-music and take a look at a more traditional way of marketing the stuff. Because I believe that if you look at a video, unless you're really, truly stupid, you've seen it enough after six times. And if there's a good song and you really like it, you can listen to it hundreds of times – it becomes part of your life. Now that can still happen, and that's what builds valuable catalog; it's what gives you long-range income. It also makes hit records, too. I mean, if you can't get a song out of your head, that's a hit. By shifting the emphasis over to pictures of guys, surrounded by models, waving their guitars in the air, I think that they've made a mistake. There's a certain part of the audience that wants to consume tunes – they want stuff they can listen to, and they don't really give a fuck about MTV, because they consume music while they're riding in their car or they consume it on the job. The amount of time that they have to watch pictures of somebody doing a song is less than the amount of time they have to be exposed to a speaker someplace. So I think that what the record companies have done has been pretty shortsighted. And MTV has become increasingly arrogant through the years, to the point now where video producers will actually call them in advance, tell them what their storyboard is and ask permission whether certain images are OK to go on the air. What the fuck is that?" - Frank Zappa in Maverick by J.B. Griffith, Pulse! Indie Special, 1988.
"The beginning of the '80s gave us MTV, and music changed and switched from an audio to a video medium. (...) For worse, because I believe that the way music is to be consumed is through your ears, and it shouldn't be too important whether the person performing it looks like a model. The record companies thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened to them because it was a way for them to get cheap commercials. And so the tail started wagging the dog. The record companies stopped signing groups that could play in favor of groups that looked good in pictures because they figured we could always get a producer to sing their songs and do their stuff for them, and that happened plenty of times. So you get a bunch of models to make the video and forget about the music. So that part of that worked. A young audience who never experienced any music to speak of started watching MTV the same way they watched Saturday morning cartoons. And it caught on. There was no competition. Before MTV if you wanted to have a hit record, there were probably 10,000 stations in America where you could break something regionally and have it spread. Now there is one MTV with a short playlist, and because of that the record companies put their own balls into the bear trap and sprung it on themselves, now they can't make a move without calling MTV and getting permission, they call up in advance to say we are getting ready to make a video, we are going to have such and such pictures in it, what do you think, and MTV is a total censorship organization and it has all the major record companies at its mercy. I started getting really weary of MTV when they started inventing rock'n'wrestling, where we're seeing videos of Hulk Hogan urging kids to take their vitamins, urging kids to grow up big and strong like him, and be an American. It really was on the level of a Saturday morning cartoon." - Signs Of The Times, Bob Guccione, Jr., Spin, July 1991.
References
See also
- Michael Jackson
- Beavis and Butt-head
- Daria
- Fábio Massari, MTV presenter
