Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Post Modernism and Consumer Culture

by E. Ann Kaplan

The first non-stop rock video channel was launched in the US in 1981. As a unique popular culture form, MTV warrants attention, and in this, the first study of the medium, originally published in 1987, E. Ann Kaplan examines the cultural context of MTV and its relationship to the history of rock music. The first part of the book focuses on MTV as a commercial institution, on the contexts of production and exhibition of videos, on their similarity to ads, and on the different perspectives of directors and viewers. Does the adoption of adolescent styles and iconography signal an open-minded acceptance of youth’s subversive stances; or does it rather suggest a cynicism by which profit has become the only value?

In the second part of the book, Kaplan turns to the rock videos themselves, and from the mass of material that flows through MTV she identifies five distinct types of video: the ‘romantic’, the ‘socially conscious’, the ‘nihilistic’, the ‘classical’, and the ‘postmodern’. There are detailed analyses of certain videos; and Kaplan focuses particularly on gender issues in videos by both male and female stars. The final chapter explores the wider implications of MTV. What does the channel tell us about the state of youth culture at the time?

Genres: Music, Academic

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Felipe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very helpful and interesting, but I rankled a bit at her interpretation of androgyny in hair metal performers (although I rankle with every iteration of that ideology, not just Kaplan's in particular). Also a lot of Freudian analysis, which... sigh. But still, a very good resource for anyone interested in postmodernism, MTV, or just how music (and how we consume it) was changing in the 1980s in general.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

If Lacan did not say it, it does not matter. Kaplan can channel Lacan into a sock puppet and than speak The Truth (TM).