Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture - Softcover

Kaplan, E. Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0416333907 ISBN 13: 9780416333909

Publisher: Methuen, 1987

Synopsis

Kaplan examines the cultural context of MTV and its relationship to the history of rock music.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Methuen
• Publication date: 1987
• ISBN 10: 0416333907
• ISBN 13: 9780416333909
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 196
• Illustrator: Over 20 B/w Photographs, Few Tables