Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [69]
Yet the lyrics are not finally the point (just try following them): gangsta rappers think they are using rock to take on the official culture. But of course the official culture owns them rock, stock, and barrel and it is they who are being used. The point is neither the words nor even the music, but the pictures as they image the music and the big sell that goes with the pictures. MTV is about the sound of American hot and American cool, about style and affect where nothing is quite as it seems, where “bad” is good and lovers are bitches and killing is enlivening and where politics doesn’t count but pictures are politics. Frank Biondi, the CEO of Viacom, Redstone’s company that won the battle for Paramount in 1994 and that owns MTV, tries to explain: “There will be MTV movies, MTV products. Why not? You see Disney going into the cruise business. Maybe there will be MTV cruises and MTV special events. MTV’s mission is connecting to the audience, to the MTV Generation…. We want to provide a point of view for the MTV Generation. Why do you read the Times when you can get almost all the same information on-line? Because you want a point of view, a sensibility. That is what we are selling.”24 It is hard to know exactly what, beyond simple consumption, the impact of selling ambience by promoting rock music will be either in America or on the hundred cultures whose youth are now tuned in to it. It is easy to condemn lyrics weighted with hate, but while plenty of musicians end up with assault, rape, and even murder charges on their rap sheets (rep sheets!), such lyrics are hardly the cause of the brutal realities they mirror or caricature, and breeding anarchy and brutality is clearly not what MTV executives who talk about promoting “freedom, liberation, personal creativity, unbridled fun and hope for a radically better future” think they are doing.25
Sharp musicological investigations are desperately needed, for though we cannot perhaps guess what the ultimate impact will be, it is clear that there will be an impact unconnected to specific lyrics; and that it is likely to play havoc with the conscious wishes and willed public policies of traditional nation-states trying to secure the common welfare or to conserve their national cultures. MTV wears neither lederhosen nor peasant blouses, and speaks neither Serbo-Croat nor Chinese, and worships neither Buddha nor Jesus, and cares neither for the family nor the state. Finally it trades in dollars, and profit is its only judge. The rockers and rappers may end up in jail, but the record companies and cable stations keep raking in the dough.26 As Robert Scheer has said in discussing Michael Jackson’s recent agon, “what is clear is that (Jackson) is neither a boy nor a man but rather a product. Throughout all but five of his thirty-five years he has been marketed energetically by avaricious adults who condoned his weirdness as long as it was marketable.”27
Some observers have expressed a naïve confidence in the essentially populist character of television. Michael J. O’Neill is fairly ardent in his belief that television is a form of “people power.” He is persuaded that “It is no longer statesmen who control the theater of politics but the theater