Unsensing MTV

James Gabrillo (University of Texas at Austin)

Key Words: nostalgia, television, digital, archive, pop music, deconstruction

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.05 | Issue 10 | July 2023

When MTV premiered on television in the summer of 1981, it embodied audio-visual novelty. The world's first cable network, dedicated to all-day music video programming, screened and sounded a format of production and mode of consumption that offered stars and spectators a multi-layered portal of characters, narratives, and worlds of pop and culture. It proposed a language of pastiche, revelling in mashups of aesthetic, tonal, thematic, and sonic texts familiar and peculiar - heralding the raucous intertextuality and expressive interplay of sound and moving images in more recent mobile platforms and digital multimedia formats of entertainment, like the algorithmic chaos of streaming performances on social media. Nostalgic memory-making of MTV in academic scholarship and the popular press has often centered on the network's portrayal as a cultural and institutional force of figures, phrases, and events that altogether form a web of networked systems.[1] But what would it mean to foreground MTV's interludes - interruptive segments, unexpected segues, interstitial advertisements, and unintended broadcast mistakes - as forms of digital nostalgic meditation and mediation? Through the aid and accessibility of digital archives, we look back and excavate MTV as text and event to regard a sampling of its earliest broadcast anomalies as compelling nodes that realize aesthetic and narrative complexities specific to the network's stylistic, symbolic, and institutional legacies.

This single-piece exploration artefact (running time 8 minutes and 10 seconds) culls an assortment of archival recordings from the digital libraryInternet Archive(http://archive.org) of sights and sounds from MTV's first day of broadcast on 1 August 1981; on Internet Archive, over 2,000 broadcast clips have been uploaded and labelled under the collective tag 'It Was Once Music Television' (https://archive.org/details/musictelevision). Adopting MTV's previously-idiosyncratic and now-customary grammar and composition of intertextual segments and music videos,[2] selected interstitial audio and visual clips are cut-and-paste as a mode of nostalgic dig, an interlude on interludes. This methodological approach gestures to anti-spectacle as spectacle through a focus not on MTV's primary presenter-led segments and initial roster of music videos but on seemingly forgotten fragments that are re-arranged as rediscovered data, recovered uncertainties, and submerged archive and thus memory, revived and re-realised. Over a hundred layers of audio and visual spliced and detached, slowed and sped up, then affixed to other (previously discordant) layers as a digitally mediated form of re-contextualization, while purposefully not 'fixing' or 'correcting' the low-fi, low-res archival sounds and images - their aesthetic appeals and blunders regarded as meaning-laden and emblematic of the network's identity and narrative. In one of the earliest scholarly considerations of MTV, E. Ann Kaplan dubbed MTV's technical and formal devices as constituting a 'postmodernist anti-aesthetic' due to its deconstructive and self-referential audio-visual subversion.[3] The video piece enacts this methodology of deconstructive multiple-coding by integrating medleys of content and audio-visual references. In such desynchronization, MTV's emergence is grasped through re-arrangement. To un-view and un-listen to the network's opening 24 hours of content on the air prompts a figurative cartography of the original text-event's granular sensibilities, in effect widening the vision and analytic dimension that re-senses MTV's pluralism of presentation and interpretation.

Such mode of (re)discovery veers away from clear-cut, nostalgia-laden paradigms of pop culture artefacts as either static or dynamic in the audience's imagination, but instead intentionally unsensible and quite 'uncanny,' borrowing Nicholas Royle's referential regarding of a sensorial disturbance of 'any straightforward sense of what is inside and what is outside'.[4] Often tonally and thematically 'associated with an experience of the threshold,' the uncanniness of a given piece of media is perceived as 'incalculable and unprogrammable in the experience of a text'.[5] The sensing of MTV's overflow mode of experience demands extended, transformative reading that mirrors this very overflow's compulsion to exceed and affect, start and stop, then repeat all over again. Through an emphasis on transition and hodgepodge, the video piece ponders the passage of time in a commercial mainstream ecosystem of networked products that delight and sell; a conveyance of the complex novelties of MTV's initial 24-hour series of sensorial barrage due to its multiplying layers of media texts as each second of broadcast passed - a collective operation marked by further intricacies throughout the network's multi-decade engagement. These interlude segments, segues, advertisements, and broadcast mistakes embody MTV's postmodern spectatorial experience of mass media, immersing the viewer through seemingly never-ending pastiche, registering via the television screen as a mode of 'immersion in the total flow of the thing itself,' as cultural critic Fredric Jameson writes of the mediated postmodern spectacle as an experience sans intermission.[6] Despite their status as interstitials to MTV's primary segments and music videos, the piece's pastiche of audio and video channels from the network's premiere cluster of interludes bear meaning for their sheer stylization, as seen in the assortment of clips that portray MTV's logo in multi-layered contexts as some form of brand commodification and aesthetic play.

Rendered, saved, and uploaded to the internet as a viewable file - labelled 'Unsensing MTV.mp4'- the exploratory video piece represents a furthering layer of trans-media engagement to the mishmash. It typifies an exercise of archival rediscovery through digital file conversion and recontextualization, epitomized by the shiny evocation of the 'MTV.mp4' tag, itself a figurative by-product of compression and reduction. Gesturing to this metadata configuration, the exploratory video compresses then remixes clips from a day-long television broadcast recorded using an assortment of schemes - foremost consumer-level analog, magnetic tape, and cassette formats - and then later converted, uploaded to, and collated as data cluster for Internet Archive, which has effectively functioned as a web of nostalgia for a mélange of texts through its publicly-accessible repository of digitized things. History, memory, and the experience of re-experiencing are mere clicks away on Internet Archive,YouTube, and other digital platforms hosting multimedia artefacts like the random array of footage from MTV's broadcast - engendering for the present-day audience an 'ever-proliferating labyrinth of collective recollection,' adopting Simon Reynolds's characterisation of postmodern pop culture's obsession with a given mediatised subject's past and the allures of retro and nostalgia.[7] Sorting the digital archive's relevant materials as layers to unsense and redevelop, the resultant video piece offers an immersive and ambient visual and soundscape whose tonality renders as appropriate to the spectating experience of MTV during its foundational on-air hours, resonating and echoing the network's industry of entertainment as both subject of historical probe, method of engagement, and indeed retromania.

A structural approach of audio-visual excavation of media and musical texts - of cutting and pasting, reduction and amplification, downloading and uploading - also befits the affect of excess that MTV sensed and sounded: the activity of the viewer-listener constantly catching up to persistent audio-visual extravaganza as stylistic and reflective system. Such catch-up to coherence, located within MTV's constant resistance to established sense, was formative to clusters of audiences and their broadcast and musical experiences. Here it is productive to return to the exploratory video piece, which navigates transitions from coherence to incoherence through dissonance and the forging of reconsidered textual, visual, and sonic narratives - from ambiguity to frustration, from alien to synchronization - to depict a haunting affect that transports the audience through suspended animation.[8] Detached and isolated from their respective original audio and video channels, the 'newly' organised images and sounds manifest their own transcendence through temporal and spatial play that depicts the original audio and visual sources as obscured.[9]

The piece offers an evocation of the experience of early MTV and the music video format - and its paradoxes of surface excess and meaning-laden ambiguity. It taps into all and any, 'as indiscriminate as a portable recorder gathering up all the sounds around it,' invoking Agnès Gayraud's conceptualization of pop music artefacts and experiences as having 'no outside,' all the while obeying to cycles of cultural revival and remaining 'perpetually entangled in the reified world'.[10] This repeated recycling of text, event, and spectacle generates its own mode of pastiche for a given time and space - whether 1981 or 2023 - as tuneful bricolage emblematic of MTV's early postmodernism and cultural-commercial logics that adapted and ironised beyond previous barriers of utilization in the pop entertainment sphere. Adopting MTV's approach, signs and symbols come and go in the piece, stimulating the viewer to habituate to audio-visual pluralism, 'a coexistence not even of multiple and alternate worlds so much as of unrelated fuzzy sets and semiautonomous subsystems,' following Jameson,[11] that are realized by the music video format, the network's programming, and the broader metamorphosis of production, performance, and spectatorial practices at the turn of the twenty-first century. It renders MTV's audio-visual ceaselessness as a sort of 'total flow' trademark of the medium. Aside from the individual narratives of the music videos it broadcast, MTV is aboutthis very flow of sound and image: a proclivity to always keep the postmodern text going - and showing and sounding - as source of meaning, a representation of postmodern technology consuming and celebrating itself.[12]

The music video network's embrace of post-structural style served as scaffolding for its decades-long mediated pop mythologizing - and the subsequent development of mediated forms and formats within the web of mainstream entertainment nodes. Analyzing the sensorial, institutional, and reception patterns of MTV's early years of broadcast, the late cultural theorist John Fiske observed in 1986: 'Culture is a sense making process, and mainstream culture makes mainstream sense. Arranging and relating the signifieds is central to this process, for the signifieds are the cultural categories imposed upon our experience whose resulting order constructs the sense that we make. The signified is simultaneously both the process and the product of culture.'[13] Breaking up archival things, as in the case of our exploratory video's methodology, reorders them first individually then collectively to move closer to a renewed likeness of the text-event, guiding the effectively post-postmodern spectator-listener to a remediated perspective.

I utilize this deconstructive multimedia approach in my broader work on contemporary pop music networks in the US and the Philippines, as well as in my musicology and digital cultures courses at the University of Texas at Austin, where students engage in lab-style activities that encourage them to reconsider historical archives and previously processed multimedia texts using digital cut-and-paste tools. This generative process of breaking things up into component layers (be it two, ten, or in the case of the exploratory video at hand: a hundred layers of video and audio channels), and then piecing them together in a distinct manner through digital tools of (de)construction, reframes perception and analytical consideration of long-running multimedia subjects across passing socio-cultural eras and meaning-making mechanisms. It cultivates cultural portrayal as a magnification of transition within palpable artefacts and events, as downloaded archive and uploaded memorialization of the human-media dialectic - excavating past forms (and the ideas and practices they produced) through the juxtaposition of new and old formats, reframing their significance. It is unsensing as a process of grasping, viewing, sounding, and indeed resensing of the complex codes and convergences of popular culture and entertainment.

Footnotes

[1] Adam Behr, '40 Years of MTV: The Channel That Shaped Popular Culture As We Know It,' The Conversation, August 2, 2021, https://theconversation.com/40-years-of-mtv-the-channel-that-shaped-popular-culture-as-we-know-it-165365 ; Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution (New York: Plume, 2011); Steve Jones, 'MTV: The Medium Was The Message,' Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (2006): 83-88; Jack Banks, 'MTV and the Globalization of Popular Culture.' International Communication Gazette 59, no. 1 (1997): 43-60; Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); R. Serge Denisoff, Inside MTV (New York: Routledge, 1988).

[2] See Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader (London: Routledge, 1993).

[3] E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (London: Routledge, 1987), 33. On grainy aesthetics of musical multimedia, see Lucas Hilderbrand, 'Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics,' Camera Obscura 19, no. 3 (2004): 56-91.

[4] Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 2.

[5] Royle, The Uncanny, 259.

[6] Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991): 70-78.

[7] Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011): 56.

[8] On the temporal disjunction yielded by the mediated memorialization of pop music artists and texts, see Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014).

[9] On the 'unseen-ness' of sound, see Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[10] Agnès Gayraud, Dialectic of Pop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020), 27, 419.

[11] Jameson, Postmodernism, 372.

[12] Jameson, Postmodernism, 385.

[13] John Fiske, 'MTV: Post-Structural Post-Modern,' Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 1 (1986): 74.

References

• Banks, Jack. 'MTV and the Globalization of Popular Culture,' International Communication Gazette 59, no. 1 (1997): 43-60.
• Behr, Adam. '40 Years of MTV: The Channel That Shaped Popular Culture As We Know It.' The Conversation, August 2, 2021. https://theconversation.com/40-years-of-mtv-the-channel-that-shaped-popular-culture-as-we-know-it-165365.
• Denisoff, R. Serge. Inside MTV. New York: Routledge, 1988.
• Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Winchester: Zero Books, 2014.
• Fiske, John. 'MTV: Post-Structural Post-Modern.' Journal of Communication Inquiry 10, no. 1 (1986): 74-79.
• Frith, Simon, Andrew Goodwin, Lawrence Grossberg. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London: Routledge, 1993.
• Gayraud, Agnès. Dialectic of Pop. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
• Goodwin, Andrew. Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
• Hilderbrand, Lucas. 'Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics,' Camera Obscura 19, no. 3 (2004): 56-91.
• Kane, Brian. Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice . Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
• Kaplan, Ann. Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture. London: Routledge, 1987.
• Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
• Jones, Steve. 'MTV: The Medium Was The Message,' Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 1 (2006): 83-88.
• Marks, Craig and Rob Tannenbaum. I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution . New York: Plume, 2011.
• Reynolds, Simon. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past . New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.
• Royle, Nicholas. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

Author Biography

James Gabrillo is an assistant professor of music at University of Texas at Austin. Previously a lecturer at The New School and a postdoc at Princeton, he earned his PhD at Cambridge. His book Pop Convergence (under contract with Oxford University Press) examines aesthetics and networks of musical multimedia in contemporary Manila. Gabrillo's research has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musical Quarterly, Rock Music Studies, American Music Perspectives, and the Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collection Articulating Media: Genealogy, Interface, Situation (Open Humanities Press). Gabrillo previously worked as a multimedia journalist and arts editor.