From: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org (idealcopy-digest) To: idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Subject: idealcopy-digest V4 #135 Reply-To: idealcopy@smoe.org Sender: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-idealcopy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk idealcopy-digest Tuesday, May 1 2001 Volume 04 : Number 135 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: [idealcopy] MTV Get Off The Air! [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2001 20:41:55 -0500 (CDT) From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: [idealcopy] MTV Get Off The Air! On Mon, 30 Apr 2001, Katherine Pouliot wrote: > > Well, rhetorically, punk of the DKs' school always did push things pretty > > far - but simplified to "if you never bother to think about anything, by > > default you'll just believe what you're told," I think this is true. > > Sure, there are plenty of people that fit into a similar type of description > and fate. However, just because one watches Mtv (for example, picked out of > all sorts of other "mindless" activities) doesn't mean that one never > bothers to think about anything, or that as a result one will "just believe" > what one is told. That is the point I'm trying to make. Jello's criticism is directed at MTV - not at its viewers. It's a criticism of passive entertainment (and implicitly, passive viewers), but it does not claim it's impossible to watch MTV in any other way - only that passivity is clearly the mode MTV would prefer its viewers to adopt. (As someone pointed out, Jello had to watch MTV to make the criticims, right?) FWIW, I thought MTV in the early years was kind of interesting - because of the relatively limited amount of videos available, it perforce played some fairly interesting stuff. It's not music videos that are intrinsically awful. Of course, nowadays MTV doesn't even play videos more than a couple of hours a day - it primarily caters to the most infantile audience possible (literally - as near as I can tell half of its shows have audiences whose primary attraction is watching people smear shit or its substitutes on themselves (Tom Green) or otherwise do stupid, gross-out stunts (Jackass)). > >It becomes deeply ironic by the time you get to "Maximum RnR"-type > >orthodoxy, of course... > > ?? Sorry, not sure what you mean here. Guess it's the result of all that > Mtv watching! haha... MRnR became a watchword for a near-Stalinist sense of punk orthodoxy: in order to win the magazine's approval, there was virtually a checklist of what a band must sound like, sing about, etc. Reall, the complete opposite of "punk" in the sense of "do what you want" or even DIY (if you're talking someone else's opinion for gospel, adding nothing to it of your own, you might as well not bother to do it at all). - --Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html ::glibby glop gloopy nibby nobby noopy la la la la lo:: ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 10:32:08 +0200 From: "giluz" Subject: RE: [idealcopy] MTV Get Off The Air! > This cynical conspiracy theory type of attitude gives me a chuckle and a > flashback to my college days. I find it funny that a lot of "punk" people > believe that anyone not having this type of attitude in life is > someone who > is controlled by alpha waves and Mtv's idea of "this is the future of > music", etc. It is true to an extent. Conspiracy/marxist theories were always quite good at analysing big powerful corporations, but not very good at analysing the mass response to them, i.e.: This analysis is quite correct as far as MTV is concerned, but less right when you speak about the actual people that watch it. There has to be something more complicated than referring to most people as 'the masses'. >So what the Hell happened to Jello Biafra anyway??? He didn't watch enough MTV, so he got so political and ideological that he thought the music was secondary. Last I heard of him, he kept releasing double or triple CD sets, containing mostly political sermons and hardly any music. giluz ------------------------------ End of idealcopy-digest V4 #135 *******************************