One world, one operating system

[imomus]

I very much agree with what John Harris says in his article in today's Guardian, The Bland Play On. Selected highlights of the piece:

'Anglo-American popular music is among globalisation's most useful props. Never mind the nitpicking fixations with interview rhetoric and stylistic nuance that concern its hardcore enthusiasts - away from its home turf, mainstream music, whether it's metal, rap, teen-pop or indie-rock, cannot help but stand for a depressingly conservative set of values: conspicuous consumption, the primacy of the English language, the implicit acknowledgement that America is probably best.'



'Though the output of MTV, VH1 and the snowballing number of radio stations owned by Clear Channel might be dressed up in pop's customary language of diversity and individualism, the music they pump out is now standardised to the point of tedium.'

'In 2004, there are but a handful of international musical superstars: Beyoncé, 50 Cent, Justin Timberlake, Eminem, Norah Jones, Coldplay. To characterise the process behind their global success as top-down is something of an understatement. MTV may have initially been marketed with the superficially empowering slogan, "I want my MTV"; more recently, with billions gladly hooked up, it has used the flatly sinister, "One planet, one music". Those four words beg one question: who decides?'

'Two factors hardened pop into the hegemonic monolith it is today. Firstly, though the transatlantic cultural exchange brought pop a new artistic richness, it failed to repeat the trick elsewhere. With a few notable exceptions, continental Europe has long been barred from offsetting an ongoing deluge of Anglo-American imports with any lasting worldwide successes of its own; even the popular music of Africa, where the fusion of regional styles with western pop has long been inspirational, seems unable to snare our attention. And then there is the aforementioned domination of a once chaotic industry by those lumbering corporations. Whither such examples of creative autonomy as Chess, Tamla Motown, Island and Creation? Long since gobbled up, like so many of the western world's more interesting elements.'

'Underlying that picture is a tragic irony indeed: music founded in a spirit of spontaneity and self-expression ending up at the core of an ever-more standardised planet.'

Read the whole article...

Comments

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

I wonder sometimes what portion of the tax dollars I pay are spent by covert agencies "promoting" American popular music overseas. It's no secret that cultural exports were one of the major weapons of the Cold War.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually heard the president of MTV in the 80s claiming somewhere that the network had helped bring down the Iron Curtain! (And recently we've had David Hasselhof (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3465301.stm) claiming the same thing.)

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

a) I offer the same argument that contemporary missionaries offer in defense of their own work. Despite the suggestion in your clever graphic (I think the American flag swastika's a bit de trop, by the way), people are free to choose whether they want to adopt the foreign import. Tatars of the Caucasus are free to choose whether they want to hear Britney or their own traditional music. They're also free to listen to both. While "bad money drives out good," I'm not sure this is true of cultural products. Perhaps, as I child of the optimistic 90's, I'm just naively missionating for globalization.

b) Regarding the supremacy of the English language, I can offer a surprising contrast to Radiohead's feebleness in front of the Italian crowd: Van Halen (http://www.vhboots.com/southamericanassault.html). On this bootleg I've linked, which my older brother owns, the inimitable David Lee Roth constantly regales the massive Montevideo crowd with his high school spanish, provoking cries of delight. "Credo que Uruguay es el pais numero uno in SudoAmerica!!" He also spontaneously composes an ode to the city of Montevideo out of Spanish doggerel rhymes which the band immediately joins and expands into a full song.

c) No hegemonic monolith lasts. Human creativity and variety will triumph over all standardization and control.

This is our music

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

Döm om min förvåning when I was informed of an MTV Nordic series called "This is our music".
It's actually very nice. A friend of mine was involved (New York and Chicago features). Zeena Parkins, Anticon, The Books, Differnet, Animal Collective, Fat Cat...etc. Of course, it was a one-off project.

Re: This is our music

[klasensjo.livejournal.com]

Oops. Forgot. Watch it here: http://www.nordic.mtve.com/shows/thisisit/start.asp

Re: This is our music

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wow, The Books and The Animal Collective on MTV! Come back, (Swedish) MTV, all is forgiven! It's like finding green tea flavor Haagen Dazs in Tokyo!

[moonorchid.livejournal.com]

Your graphic (is it yours?) is, in my opinion, way brilliant. With your permission I'm going to steal it and use it as my avatar picture on a certain out-of-the-way bbs used by alumni of my college radio station.

With respect to a criticism of the graphic leveled earlier, I'd like to quote Stereolab:

"look at the symbols, they are alive. They move evolve, and then they die".

MTV does not own meaning, and neither does anyone else. Thank G_d for that!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're welcome to reappropriate my appropriated image, gathered from Google image searches on the terms:

MTV logo
Eagle globe

Long live the Googlefolkism: robbing logos from the rich and giving them to the poor! Long live the Situationist International!

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Moonorchid, the graphic is very well designed. I can respect the construction and delivery of an argument with which I partially or entirely disagree. In this case, I disagree with the suggestion, implicit in the juxtaposition of the MTV logo with a Stars-n-Stripes Swastika, that mass-media cultural imperialism is the moral or functional equivalent of National Socialism. (Symbols may move and evolve, but in the hisorical short term, they do so by accumulating meanings, not replacing them.)

Leaving aside the real crimes of the United States, however narcotic and stupefying some American mass culture may be, it is not imposed at gunpoint, the way, for example, opium was imposed on China by the old empire.

Momus, I'm curious about the sources of the other logos/seals on the right side of the image.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what they are, they're just what came up when I searched on MTV logo. They all appear to be German, and when I laid the three of them in a row there was a space at the bottom of the design and I thought of the swastika and stripes I'd been saving for some really awful American imperialist atrocity. Well, the Iraqi torture stuff probably qualifies. And I really believe that no progress can be made until we acknowledge that the 'evil' is us. By us I mean something as wide as 'everyone in the West', and something as narrow as 'the Bush regime'. We've seen a little of that acknowledgement with Rummy's showtrial yesterday, but we need to take it much further. Not say 'This is not the American way, so we'll keep spreading the eagle' but 'Actually this does seem to be the American way, so we're just going to put that eagle back in its cage.'

[imomus.livejournal.com]

however narcotic and stupefying some American mass culture may be, it is not imposed at gunpoint

This has been true of some periods of modern American history, but I actually think it's not true now. For instance, did you hear that the US forces broke up crowds at the site of the former Saddam statue in Baghdad on the anniversary of the statue's felling by blasting western rock music at very high volumes? American rock and pop music is very much part of the armoury at the disposal of the military, used as a kind of cultural weapon in actual warfare. Later it is also used as an omnipresent social conditioner in occupied countries (cf Armed Forces Radio in Germany) as well as a more subtle vehicle for the English language, western attitudes, etc.

[piratehead.livejournal.com]

Point taken. I wish I could rely reflexive prejudices, and say that it was some avant-garde, Guardian-reading bohemian artist who had ventured to conflate the swastika with the US flag, rather than our actions. Empire does as empire is, I guess.

[moonorchid.livejournal.com]

Piratehead the new man, :)

It seems that we read the swastika differently. For me, the meaning that seeps through in the graphic above from the swastika shape (which is different from what would come through from a swastika on its own) is "big, terrifying, violent, and very, very bad". Or, to be a little more poetic about it, "fire machine ass rape". It conveys nothing to me of governmental philosophy, especially with the stars and stripes hogging the floor on that point, and only very, very faintly - as a sort of charicature - does it evoke the historical Nazis. The net effect of the stars and stripes swastika for me is something like "big, terrifying, violent, and very, very bad America-Democracy-Freedom-Patriotism".

In this case (my case), a particular, historically situated meaning of the swastika has been abstracted into certain characteristics of it's referent in that historical situation. If I'm not mistaken, this kind of movement occurs all the time in language. There's probably even a name for it.

The meaning of the swastika is often presented as the polar opposite of the meaning of the American flag. I find it very interesting, and very plausible, that some people could assign to the flag *some* of the same meanings that we (that is, I) assign to the swastika.

Consider MTV as the spokesperson for big, terrifying, violent America-Democracy et al ... it seems to me like a good illustration of the article, and a fairly reasonable point.

Notions of what is or is not in bad taste are culturally based (we can probably agree), and perhaps I may be permitted to point out that I am a (treasonous) American while you are Greek (I think) and that I am a goy (as far as I know) while you are a Jew (more or less). It seems to make intuitive sense that we might read the graphic differently - the flag means things to me that I doubt it means to you, or means them more emphatically - vice-versa with the swastika - and if my comments have not indicated such, let me say that I respect your reading, whether or not I understand it correctly.

above

[(Anonymous)]

I really hope you aren't harking back to some mythical golden age before MTV where pop music was pure and untainted. That Tamla Motown or Creation records were not as manipulative as the next person. Is there something inherently wrong with liking Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake?

Dominic

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the point here is that success-tending-towards-monopoly changes everything. Humans are wonderful animals, but when their success threatens every other animal on the planet, we may want to ask ourselves questions about diversity, pluralism, conservation and so on. The same is true with 'the western way', 'western pop and rock' etc.

The swastika flag is shorthand, for me, for the idea that we must never forget that we ourselves are the problem: the very things that make us successful and great are also the things that threaten everybody else. Good and bad must combine in the symbol in a startling way to show this; it must become paradoxical and rather shocking. 'Oh, the new Nazis might be us!'

By becoming the correct way we become incorrect, and in fact a kind of plague. To bring historical memories of Nazism to the swastika symbol would detract from this meaning, because Nazism was a short-lived and radical regime which, although imperialistic, was too extreme to become any sort of human norm and was wiped out. It did not become 'the international system' or 'the free world' or 'the international community' or 'globalism'. It never achieved its empire. We did.

hedge-a-money

[(Anonymous)]

First of all, I'd have to say that the u.s. flag/swastika graphic (along with any and all likening authority figures to Hitler, fascists, etc.) is just laziness. The swastika is shorthand for evil in the same way the Mona Lisa is shorthand for culture, and they're about equally exhausted as icons. Anyone who is moved by the likening of the American flag to the swastika has apparently missed out on decades of trite, easily dispensed cultural criticism from Jello Biafra and all of his pals ("Frankenchrist"? ouch...biting...).

In terms of the meat of the argument, the crimes commited by the American army have nothing to do with American pop culture, and it is misleading to link the two. Torture is crime, and binding it to American cultural export is a poorly informed, reactionary gesture.

Of course American pop culture is, as it ever was, a force for conformity. It is the glue that holds high school crowds together--Britney is a sort of aural Tommy Hilfiger. I don't understand why this is anything new, or why this is a specifically American--or indeed contemporary--pattern. I mean, I am American and only know American pop culture, but is there any substantial advantage in having home-grown conformity? If you grew up in a small village in the 16th century in which that one insanely catchy Alpentanz tune is the only thing the minstrels will play at the annual ankle-slapping competition, how is that essentially different from Britney? If your horizon ends at the village borders, how does regional variation count as diversity? You go from cradle to grave only knowing a single music style. The village mindset will always be dominant, it is, I would argue, quintessentially human. It's just that the village is getting global. Independently minded folks should revel at the new scale of hegemony--the bigger it is, the less total it is--the more cracks there are in the totalizing veneer, the more opportunities there are for the development of communities of independent viewpoints.

By the by, how on earth does Motown represent an alternative viewpoint? They owned American pop music for about ten years.