John Mundy,
Popular Music on Screen: From Hollywood Musical to Music Video. Manchester University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0719040299 (pb)
272 pp.
US$19.95

Uploaded 30 June 2000

For historians of art and culture, perhaps the most basic, but difficult judgment one must make concerns how we measure the significance of particular historical events or trends. Such a question not only relates to basic issues of periodization, causation, and historical narration, but perhaps at an even more fundamental level, it forces us to evaluate our grasp of an event’s uniqueness and particularity. Do we contextualize the event or trend within a series of precedents such that it is understood as a logical outcome of prior aesthetic or cultural traditions? Or do we highlight the differences between an event and its predecessors in order to underscore its revolutionary qualities? Do we envision history as a series of events linked within seamless chains of causality? Or do we envision history as a series of ruptures that require new paradigms and new modes of thinking in order to be properly understood?

These questions lie at the heart of John Mundy’s Popular Music on Screen, a synoptic history of the relationship between popular music and various screen technologies. By taking a global perspective on the political and visual economies of popular music, Mundy attempts to counter a position that has become virtual dogma within cultural studies and popular musicology, namely that music video is a radical and revolutionary cultural form that must be understood within the ontologies and aesthetics of postmodernism. Contra E. Ann Kaplan, Fredric Jameson, and others, Mundy argues that music video is merely the latest manifestation of longstanding representational and economic strategies for visualizing popular music that can be traced as far back as the film scores of the silent era. More importantly, for Mundy, these economic and representational strategies can be discerned in several disparate historical phenomena, including Vitaphone shorts made during the transition to sound, classical Hollywood musicals, early film jukebox technologies, youthpix of the fifties and sixties, and television performances on variety and music programs.

Much of the book’s organization, then, reflects Mundy’s interest in tracing a visual economy of popular music through several cultural forms and historical periods. The first four chapters comprise a unit on popular music and American film that examines the convergence of the two industries through the twin lenses of institutional history and the semiotics of musical performance. After briefly discussing the rise of film scoring largely in opposition to popular music traditions, Mundy then turns to the visualization of musical performances that emerge in the 1920s with the recording of vaudeville acts in experimental sound films produced by Warner Bros. for the purposes of market testing. These early shorts initiate a set of representational strategies that, of course, culminate in Al Jolson’s star turn in The Jazz Singer (1927), a film that uneasily mixes stylistic elements from radio, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and theatrical melodrama. Chapter 3 addresses the continuation of this visual economy within the genre of the musical, but also shows how it was assimilated to a larger set of ideological and stylistic concerns as it moved away from a revue structure toward a more integrated form. Chapter 4 considers the emergence of youth and race-based musical genres in terms of their impact on the visual economy of popular music. Through analyses of youthpix like The Blackboard Jungle (1955), The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), and Jailhouse Rock (1957), Mundy suggests that early cinematic representations of rock ‘n’ roll not only undermined its identification with “authentic” vernacular forms of music, but also accommodated the new cultural form to the predominant ideologies of show business and entertainment.

Chapters 5 and 6 also comprise an individual unit within the book’s overall structure by focusing on the visual economy of popular music within British film and television. Chapter 5, which is perhaps the strongest in the book, features compelling analyses of such quintessentially British stars as Jessie Matthews, George Formby, and Cliff Richard while simultaneously contextualizing their film work within the development of an indigenous tradition of British film musicals and of British radio and record industries that rival those of the United States. Chapter 6 discusses the performance of popular music on television, and uses production histories and analyses of programs like Ready, Steady, Go to suggest an institutional framework for the later development of music video and MTV. By the time Mundy arrives at his discussion of music video in Chapter 7, anything he says about it is bound to seem like an afterthought. Yet by having very carefully contextualized music video within a larger history, Mundy is able to make connections between music video and previous traditions that have been unavailable to other analysts. The emergence of a ‘music video’ aesthetic in the 1980s, for example, is roughly parallel to the emergence of a vaudeville aesthetic in early musicals. The contemporary use of popular songs as either diegetic or nondiegetic film music marks the return of the compilation score first introduced in the silent era. Contemporary industry synergies can be seen as reconfigurations of older alliances between film companies, record companies, and music publishers. And the production of music videos as a form of software can be seen to support the implementation of digital and satellite television systems in much the same way that Vitaphone shorts served the innovation and diffusion of film sound technologies.

Unfortunately, though, the sheer breadth and scope of Popular Music on Screen can be seen as both a strength and a weakness. Certainly the abundance of data Mundy brings to the book offers a daunting range of evidence to support his central argument. Moreover, as a scholar who synthesizes several different historical perspectives, Mundy also establishes a new paradigm for further research on the visual economy of popular music, one that is especially sensitive to the economic, institutional, and social factors that have shaped its development as a cultural form. Finally, Mundy’s discussion also sheds much needed light on several subjects that deserve greater critical attention, such as the Soundies (musical shorts made for early film jukeboxes in the 1940s), Snader Telescriptions (musical shorts made for television distribution in the early fifties), and Top of the pops promo clips. In all of these respects, Mundy’s book is an important, indeed perhaps even groundbreaking, work in a growing field on the relationship between screen technologies and popular music.

At the same time, however, Mundy relies heavily on secondary histories for much of the factual information in the book. As a result, newcomers and general readers will find a wealth of new information here, but there is comparatively less to offer anyone who is already familiar with the literature that Mundy cites. Beyond that, the footnotes in the early chapters feature some somewhat strange omissions. The chapter on the introduction of sound technologies,for example, relies almost solely on Scott Eyman’s The Speed of Sound (1997, Simon and Schuster). One wonders if a consideration of Douglas Gomery’s pioneering work (which Eyman himself uses) or of Don Crafton’s more recent The Talkies (1997, University of California Press) might have changed aspects of Mundy’s argument. Likewise, in the section on music in the silent film, Mundy relies almost solely on Martin Marks’ Music and The Silent Film while neglecting the much earlier work of Chuck Berg. Here the exclusive focus on Marks encourages Mundy to overstate the avoidance of popular music within silent film scores. Berg, for example, states that early film accompanists sometimes attempted to differentiate their performance style by specializing in the use of currently popular tunes. Similarly, my own research shows that industry awareness of the sales potential of popular theme songs began around 1920 and eventually paved the way for such hits of the late silent period as Diane from Seventh Heaven and Charmaine from What Price Glory? While these examples are certainly not representative of the silent film score as a whole, they show that it is equally a mistake to identify it solely with the use of popular light classics.

All in all, however, Mundy’s book makes an important and vital contribution to the field, if only as a polemical reply to postmodern theorists. As Mundy points out, it is only a critical myopia that encourages such theorists to ignore the precedents for music video, one that can only be explained in terms of a blind obedience to a theoretical program that seems to deny that such broader historical continuities even exist. In countering that critical myopia, Mundy offers a lively mix of insights on the institutional relationships between film and popular music and on the way that the visual representations of pop are inserted into a matrix of racial, cultural, social, and aesthetic ideologies. For anyone who wants a thorough and vivid introduction to the subject, this is an excellent place to start.

Jeff Smith