Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Post Modernism and Consumer Culture. This item is unavailable.Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Post Modernism and Consumer Culture

Discusses the history of MTV (Music Television) and rock videos, and discusses their affect on popular culture

Kaplan (Women and Film), a Rutgers professor of English and film, offers a full-length study of the 24-hour cable channel MTV. Even though the channel airs promotional rock videos in "one nearly continuous advertisement," she notes that its use of avant-garde techniques and Hollywood pastiche have made MTV a popular, postmodernist success. Kaplan examines the business side of MTV, then delves into the rock videos themselves, which she divides into five distinct types (romantic, socially conscious, nihilistic, classical and postmodern). She also considers violence in videos, commenting on Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More," which many consider typically nasty: "The events do not have the overall investment in a certain kind of desire that the sadistic narrative usually has." In general, Kaplan argues that MTV "utilizes adolescent desire for its own commercial ends." Her conclusions about the long-range implications of MTV and today's "massified youth culture" are perceptive, depressing and probing.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.