Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [188]
18. See Elisabeth A. Brown, “Music Television Turns 10,” The Christian Science Monitor, August 6, 1991, pp. 10-11.
19. Clarke, “Rock,” p. 199.
20. Celestine Bohlen, “Russia Parties Subdued by Early Vote Returns,” The New York Times, December 13, 1993, p. A 6.
21. Cited by Azhginkhina, “High Culture,” p. 193.
22. Nor is MTV really to be taken seriously when it plays bad boy, as the group Public Enemy does. The mischief starts with the group’s name (so too with N.W.A. [Niggers With Attitude]) and continues in song titles such as “Fight the Power,” which black filmmaker Spike Lee used in his Do the Right Thing. A good deal of rapper rage is all posture: impotence as porn with the volume turned up so that hard decibels and fierce scatology cover the softness underneath. Most viewers around the world do not understand English anyway, and for them the point is the sound, the style, and the feel, not the words.
23. The Nobody Beats the Wiz chain thus runs a major advertising campaign featuring the schlock-shock MTV cartoon figures Beavis and Butt-head wearing MTV T-shirts while selling their Death Rock album. This anthology album assembles a morbid collection of death songs aimed at self-destructive youths who are killing themselves and each other at record rates. The ad ran in major media markets before Thanksgiving of 1993 under the headline “Huh, huh, huh, This ad is cool!” with large cartoon figures of the two MTV cartoon characters Beavis and Butt-head. These blatant morons had just a month earlier been relegated to a late-night hour, after children watching the popular MTV series in prime time had set fire to their rooms in imitation of their cartoon pranks. Songs on the Beavis and Butt-head Experience album include “I Hate Myself and Want to Die” (Nirvana); “Looking Down the Barrel of a Gun” (Anthrax); “99 Ways to Die” (Megadeth); “Search and Destroy” (Red Hot Chili Peppers); and “I Am Hell” (White Zombie).
24. Seabrook, “Rocking,” p. 75.
25. Citation from Seabrook, ibid., p. 69. A number of rap artists have had run-ins with the law, including Tupac Shakur whose 1991 album “2pacalypse Now” raps about “droppin’ the cop!” He allegedly did just that in October 1993, and was himself the victim of a shooting in late 1994; the rapper Flavor Flav of Public Enemy was arrested around the same time for attempted murder after reportedly shooting at a neighbor. But the real profiteers here are not the rappers who have found in the glamorization of ghetto life a paying hustle, but the record companies and the corporations that own and quietly earn considerable profits from them. For background see, for example, Toure, “Snoop Dogg’s Gentle Hip-Hop Growl,” The New York Times, November 21, 1993, Section 2, p. 32.
26. Lyrics and reality get all mixed up in MTV’s savage version of McWorld. “Gangsta rap” often is the work of authentic gangsters. In 1993 alone, in addition to the Tupac Shakur arrest for allegedly shooting two cops noted above, Flavor Flav allegedly shot at his girlfriend’s lover; Snoop Doggy Dogg was charged for carrying two guns and has a murder charge pending; and assault and rape charges have been brought against sundry other denizens of MTV. For one report see Nathan McCall, “The Rap Against Rap,” The Washington Post, National Weekly Edition, November 14, 1993, p. C 1; and the Newsweek cover story “Rap and Race,” Newsweek, June 29, 1992, pp. 46-52.
27. Robert Scheer remarks that the handlers and profiteers who lived off Michael Jackson never seemed to notice that “there was something profoundly wrong with elevating someone so maladjusted to the status of universal spokesman for children in the sacred precincts of Disneyland and Pepsi commercials.” “Mega-Michael,” The Nation, October 11, 1993, pp. 376-377.
28. Michael J. O’Neill, The Roar of the Crowd: How Television and People Power Are Changing the World (New York: Times Books, 1993), p. 110.
29. Adrian Lyttelton, “Italy: The Triumph of TV,” The New York Review of Books, August 11, 1994, pp. 25–29.
30. Gore