Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton (eds.),
Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones.
Durham, Duke University Press, 2007.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4162-8
US$23.95 (pb)
360pp
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
The beat goes on?
Medium Cool is in many respects a very timely volume. As its subtitle suggests, it is a book that seeks to chart the progress of the music video form from its prehistory as “radio with images” (p. 1), through the explosion of MTV in the 80s to its current migration to the mobile phone. Music has always been one of the more mobile of media forms and its portability, from car radios to ghetto blasters and iPods, charts the age of ubiquitous media that we are now taking so much for granted. Regrettably, there is little coverage of the latter and nothing in the way of a dedicated chapter devoted to the distribution of music video content via hand-held media. This is a pity, given that the book’s principal focus involves the dissemination of music video via channels other than television, hence the sub-titular specification of ‘music video’. The main title itself also brings with it the double emphasis on the ‘cooling off’ effect of the hegemony of television as the dominant medium of display and distribution, as well as the McLuhan-esque connotation of a medium that requires substantial interaction on the part of its audience. In other words, the book concerns itself with the industrial and aesthetic implications of the shifts from music television to music video.
The assembled essays, then, can be divided into two types that embody these streams of thought. The industrial context of the political economy of music as commodity is explored in Kip Pegley’s comparison of Canada’s MuchMusic and MTV in the United States. The history of the role played by record companies in the development of the music video format is described in Amy Herzog’s superb historical account of the video jukebox, which first introduced the idea of a visual accompaniment to the promoted song. Herzog’s methodical analysis takes us through the evolution of music video as both form and medium, from the Panoram Soundie of the 1940s to the Scopitone of the 1960s. These “cinematic jukeboxes” (p. 31) are the incunabula of the music video form, both in terms of the familiar, dominant sexploitation of the genre as well as the industrial convergence of the recording and jukebox companies. What emerges from Herzog’s astute discussion is an example of one of the unsung technologies in the history of media convergence. Perspective of cultural difference are also included here, in Antti-Ville Karja’s discussion of otherness in Finnish music video and Philip Hayward’s impressive ethnographic study of music video in Papua New Guinea. Along with Herzog, Hayward proffers the most original body of field research that breaks new ground and is part of his ongoing study of the Melanesian Music Industries.
The second focus broadly concerns the audiovisual aesthetics of music video as a cultural form. Essays here range from Jason Middleton’s engaging and very contemporary discussion of the use of found footage, with specific attention to Julie Becker’s remix of The Wizard of Oz, appropriating the soundtrack of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, to Carol Vernallis’ critique of the contested place of narrative in a form that is by and large “extremely abstract” (p. 113). Roger Beebe’s discussion of pastiche and postmodernism neatly captures the significance of the moment when the music video director became as prominent as the artists themselves, heralding what Beebe calls the age of “MTV auteurism” (p. 309).
On the whole, though, this book is something of a missed opportunity. Its ostensible motivation is to offer “new and innovative models” capable of redressing the “standstill in the theorization of music video” (p. 6). Its success is very mixed in the realization of this objective. Notwithstanding the fine quality of specific essays and their overall contribution to the field of music video culture, there is a formulaic quality to Medium Cool, along the lines of ‘such and such and Music Video’. Equally, there is an overwhelming air of academic decorum and protocol about the style of writing in the majority of essays that seems out of joint with the subject matter. I’m not for a minute suggesting that the topic is not suited to scholarly rigour (think of Greil Marcus’ extraordinaryLipstick Traces), but in the interests of academic integrity there is a sober propriety about the tone of many of the essays that seems to suppress any excitement for the material being discussed (‘First I will discuss, second I document, I focus my inquiry’, etc). This polite decorum sounds too much like Perry Como to me, when the content is all Daft Punk, Puff Daddy, Aphex Twin and Buster Rhymes. A notable point of contrast here would be Erik Davis’ marvelous book on Led Zeppelin IV (Continuum, 2005), which combines the author’s characteristic erudition and literary panache with the passion of a died-in-the-wool Zeppelin fan. The result is a text that is exhilarating and memorable in its ability to weave together Gnosticism, the hermetic tradition, Satanic pacts and rock in a scholarly manner infused by the author’s passion for the music.
One recurrent theme that crops up throughout the essays, in one form or another, concerns the audio-visual dimension of the music video form itself. In fact, to use an apposite musical figure, it is something of a refrain, though in a decidedly minor key I have to say. The refrain, extrapolating from the serial references to it, goes something like, what is “music’s role in music video” (p. 112). Various authors wrestle with the apparent problem of the form’s uncomfortable dialogue between sound and vision, proffering well-wrought arguments as to which signal is foregrounded or otherwise in the “writhing hermeneutic melee that is music video” (p. 14). This debate becomes a bit tiresome, especially when the writers repeatedly note that it is a largely historical debate within music video studies and that Michel Chion seemed to have resolved the issue anyway over a decade ago with his concept of ‘audio-vision’. It is especially irritating to see this debate unravel and become more complicated and enigmatic than it needed to be in the light of the volume’s opening essay by Kay Dickinson, entitled, wait for it, ‘Music video and synaesthetic possibility’. In one of the more robustly asserted pronouncements in a book over determined by politic caution, Dickinson resolves the matter sensibly, noting that her objective is to “insist that we investigate how these two registers [image and music] interact, rather than simply picking what we consider to be the most robust opponent in a largely fantastical battle for authority” (p. 14).
A final word on the King. Medium Cool features two excellent essays on the audio-visuality of Elvis Presley. Norma Coates’ ‘Elvis from the wait up and other myths’ is a detailed analysis of the mainstream television representation of rock and roll on variety programs such as the Steve Allen Show and dedicated music shows such as American Bandstand. Reviewing the familiar hysteria to do with ‘race music’ and teenagers in the American media psyche of the 50s and 60s, Coates persuasively critiques the highly charged and ambivalent nature of the role played by television in its distribution of the devil’s music (in particular the mythology of network attempts to censor the gyrations of Elvis’ pelvis). Lisa Parks’ and Melissa McCartney’s ‘Elvis goes global’ indirectly extends Coates’ local, national focus within the US to the international broadcast of the King to the world with the 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert. While, of course, not the first live satellite distribution of music via television, nor the last, Elvis’ Hawaii concert was significant in that it was the world’s first musical performance “aired live via satellite in its entirety” (p. 257). In this it represents an important interstitial moment in the history of mediated music between the age of music television broadcasting and the post-broadcast age of music video distributed via the internet. Now pause for a moment think of what might have been… Elvis live via Bluetooth, bit-torrent or Podcast on your very own mobile phone. Now that’s really cool.
Darren Tofts,
Swinburne University, Australia.