On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
Onlelevision M-TV TORTURE BY MARVIN KITMAN One of the advantages of having cable is access to M-TV. This means you can be culturally aware. More people were talking and writing about the channel...
...A second breakthrough came when they started dancing on the clips...
...You never have time to get bored because the show changes every two or three minutes (the length of a normal clip...
...He can sing...
...The seconds when the videos are stopped sometimes last an eternity...
...The clips themselves are in an evolutionary period...
...What do you expect the videos to be about—marriage...
...I'd like to know where they get these VJs, who may usher in a new era of Preppie Punk...
...Then it kind of begins to get flat...
...At 14 minutes it is the longest clip in history...
...They were doing what psychiatrists call "free associating...
...The style is called "Beat It" dancing, in honor of Michael Jackson's smash-hit song and video of the same name...
...And before The Monkees there were the Beatles' movies, Help...
...The stories they've come up with are on an adolescent level...
...To tell you the truth, I don't have the slightest idea what most of the videos are trying to say—except get on your Kawasaki or Suzuki and ride over and buy this album or single now...
...I have my doubts, therefore, about the viability of M-TV as a medium for music...
...I'd say they have four or five...
...I liked it better in the early days when they just played the records and ran the projector endlessly...
...On M-TV, though, everything happens very quickly...
...The last one, the trend-setting "Beat It," was about a gang confrontation...
...You never get interested in anything either...
...Perhaps I give the nerds who run M-TV too much credit by imagining they went to radio for creative inspiration...
...Jackson's mini-movie, especially the parts where he goes through his changes, will remind many viewers oiAnAmeri-can Werewolf in London...
...After you've seen the 30th variation of another singer trying to imitate Jackson's moves, the great innovation seems about beaten to death...
...It's also like watching the same commercials over and over again: mesmerizing and irritating...
...The first one, "Billie Jean," was his Guess Who's Coming to Dinner...
...People usually come to M-TV to get away from printed words...
...You have to be demented to put yourself through it two nights in a row...
...Rock stars have come to an epochal divide, similar to the challenge movie idols faced when talkies replaced the silents...
...The audience will think it's back in school...
...That isn't too surprising, since the tunes are usually written by adolescent musicians for their adolescent fans...
...She looks like a blonde mop...
...You see the average clip four or five times and it's wonderful...
...They're also like seeing somebody's innermost fantasies on TV...
...It was produced in Hollywood...
...The old record length was six or seven...
...They hassle me with all the information now...
...The moment arrived last month when "Thriller," the video complement to the blockbuster album by Michael Jackson, hit the screen calling itself a minimovie...
...He'll call it M-RV—Music Radiovision...
...it concentrated on Caucasian-oriented rock...
...For a time it wasn't played on M-TV because Jackson's skin was darker than that ofmostofthe station's performers...
...They force the singer or the band leader to reveal where his group is giving concerts this week and the rest of the year...
...This one would have made the Marquis de Sade's top 40 chart...
...It made people think of West Side Story in a fancier form...
...It ruins the mood...
...I always seem to see the same ones again and again...
...So then they began illustrating the songs...
...Before his arrival, M-TV was not one of the black and white channels...
...Sitting there staring at the song is not the same as listening to it...
...I'd better not go on...
...Still, the M-TV experience, if you stay with it for an evening of prime time, reminds you a lot of Chinese water torture...
...I said...
...M-TV, which has also become the latest excuse for kids not doing their homework, is that incredible spot on the cable dial where they play commercials for record albums-—24 hours a day...
...If I hear "The Way We Were" one more time I'm going to toss my cookies...
...Jackson and Landis have achieved what the network was striving for— certainly at least in terms of audience numbers and of the discussion it generated...
...They say they have thousands of clips in their library...
...That's not a vegetable drink...
...The big video was done by a famous director, John Landis of Animal House...
...After a while, somebody realized that wasn't too thrilling, that we have been seeing pop stars live on TV since Perry Como...
...The newest thing they've added to the format is real commercials...
...Of course, people go to see Pavarotti at the Met, but that's only once...
...What I kept thinking of as I watched "Thriller" was NBC's new series, Man-imal...
...He can act...
...Thriller" has thrust the video clip genre into a new age...
...The groups of living dead wandering around are reminiscent as well of ABC's TV movie about nuclear war, The Day After, or they could be outtakes from Landis' earlier horror film spoof, Schlock...
...Watching it, you have the feeling Carl Jung would be a video clip producer today...
...It has a big story: A teen-age couple goes to see a horror movie and the boy, played by Jackson, turns into a werewolf...
...from my personal experience I wouldn't bet on it...
...Sometimes they mix the live performances, the crazy stories, acting out the fetish dreams, and the dancing all in one clip...
...1) I wondered what that poor girl Jackson was dating had done to deserve such treatment...
...Essentially, music is meant to be heard, not seen...
...There's just so many times you can watch a movie, no matter how great it is, before it starts to run out of steam...
...The commercials for records are now interrupted by commercials for products, and for M-TV...
...The screen would go bananas, ultra-strange stuff, wild images...
...Same flashbacks and kooky scenes intercut with the music...
...DeMille of the video clips...
...That's it...
...It is said to have cost a million dollars to make, and that's probably true...
...Jackson is the C.B...
...But the minimovie shows Jackson at his finest...
...But there I go putting on airs again...
...In fact, the more they play a pop song, the more you like it...
...And asking high school students to write a composition longer than 1,000 words is the cultural equivalent of genocide...
...Nina's the one with that I-j ust- climbed- out- of - the- pool-and-didn't-have-time-to-dry-my-hair look...
...Or a stockholder in the record company that sells 14 million units thanks to the publicity it gets from showing the clips...
...Remember that sitcom starring the rock group of the same name that was all the craze in the mid-'60s...
...The channel started out two and a half years ago spinning the freebies much the way radio stations do...
...Some of them are very appealing intellectually...
...and A Hard Day's Night...
...On radio, you expect a certain amount of repetition...
...It's just my rotten luck, I suppose...
...2)1 felt a little let down...
...Just like the clips on M-TV...
...I'm only proving once more that there's nothing new under the sun...
...You could shut your eyes and make believe, except then you'd be watching radio...
...Rod Stewart's "Baby Jane" seemed to be the work of a foot fetishist...
...Whenever the story was stopped to have the boys play a song, they did a video...
...From now on, singers will be required to act...
...He can dance...
...I realize that TV news deals with all of the world's problems in two-minute segments...
...The VJs, among other chores, do hard-hitting interviews with the stars...
...Even his regular-sized promotions seem like minimovies...
...This can be, to quote my favorite spokesman for the stereo, record and TV store chain, Crazy Eddie, "totally insane...
...Everything costs a lot out there...
...It's funny: The hottest new concept in television since the invention of cable itself is based on the principle of putting the worst of radio—the commercials—on the tube...
...I'm sure the kids love it...
...getting ahead in the business world...
...Every time she got near him, hair would start growing on his palms...
...This is one of the built-in problems of videos—the burn-out rate, it's called...
...The early ones were simple performance footage, excerpts from live concerts...
...They tell you how wonderful the channel is, as if you couldn't see and hear for yourself...
...In any case, it seemed that the human mind's capacity for watching "Thriller" would be strictly limited...
...I will say the clips are often visually striking—lavish productions, usually with lots of smoke...
...Either that, or directly related to the inventor of M-TV...
...It's too heavy...
...Televised music can't work that way...
...In between the two kinds of commercials they have the VJs...
...This is the dry-ice period of video...
...Full-length films have the same drawback...
...The first video moppet...
...One day, I'll bet, some young genius is going to invent a new medium called radio and put it on television...
...Others are said to be voluptuous, but never seem to be on when I'm watching...
...I always get Nina Blackwood sitting in for someone else...
...Apparently the longer a video runs, the more hype about it, the bigger the sense of emptiness you experience at the end...
...Yet after it was over—the whole 14 minutes, equivalent to 28 30-second commercials—I had two thoughts (admittedly a lot of inspiration from a video...
...Sooner or later, the clip shows were bound to take themselves more seriously...
...More people were talking and writing about the channel in 1983 than any of the regular networks...
...It can be very embarrassing...
...Or your average teenager...
...Some won't be able to make the jump...
...The whole idea could have come from—you'll never guess it—The Monkees...
...I shudder at the thought of analyzing Billy Idol's "White Wedding," with the wedding ring of thorns that makes the bride's finger bleed, the chorus in black leather shaking their der-rieres at the camera, the coffins, the exploding kitchen appliances...
...He is a consummate performer, one of those rare people, like Sammy Davis Jr., who do it all...
...The programing consists of little movies, or videos, or "clips" as the in-people call them, made by the record companies...
...Thriller" is the first video to have credits at the end, too, though that wrinkle will never catch on...
...You know, like guitars being strummed at weird angles under the glare from the lights...
...It stands for video jockey, a clever play on the old-fashioned DJ...
...For most of them this is too bad, since their acting ability is second only to their lack of talent as dancers...
...Up to a point, that is...
Vol. 67 • January 1984 • No. 1
