Jihad vs. McWorld

by Benjamin Barber

  The Hong Kong—based Star satellite network originally appeared as an independent Asian rival to Western companies, but four of its five channels are English-language broadcasts and toward the end of 1993 it sold out to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for a little more than a half billion dollars. The Australian-born naturalized American Murdoch owns, in America alone, Fox Television, Twentieth Century Fox Film, TV Guide, HarperCollins Publishers, and the New York Post. In addition to his global newspaper-and-magazine empire, he also controls Fox Television as well as a 50 percent share in British Sky Broadcasting (Europe’s dominant satellite broadcaster): with Star TV in his pocket, he adds another thirty-eight nations with a potential audience of two-thirds of the world’s population.9 That means that several billion Asian ears are cocked in his direction. Yet the only thing we know for sure about Murdoch’s intentions is that they include neither the preservation of indigenous cultures nor the democratic and civic uses of media and telecommunication networks. He might seem a threat in China, where—as in Singapore—satellite dishes are forbidden (but manufactured by the army and widely used). But Murdoch agreed to withdraw the BBC World News from Star in return for less Chinese resistance, knowing perhaps that it is not CNN or the BBC but MTV that is McWorld’s real Trojan horse in alien cultures and hostile states.

  Music Videos—McWorld’s Noisy Soul

  MTV OFFERS A fascinating picture of the rapid changes that have given American television and music a global grip on audiences. The music television video was born only in 1981, an offspring (ironically) of performance art and experimental television on the cultural margin; the kind of work presented at innovative performance studios like the Kitchen in New York. Within five years, the MTV network had become a mainstream colossus, propelling its owner Viacom into a media limelight from which it has preyed ever since on a widening spectrum of rival media outlets. When its owner, Sumner Redstone’s Viacom, snatched victory in the war for Paramount from Barry Diller’s QVC teleshopping network, Viacom emerged as one of the world’s most powerful media monoliths. Meanwhile, though mauled by Viacom, QVC has continued to mall television. But the world’s largest electronic mall is neither network television nor the shopping network, but MTV itself that exists exclusively as a marketing tool for the music industry. As John Seabrook has written, “one of the reasons MTV is a landmark in the history of media is that the boundary between entertainment and advertising has completely disappeared.”10

  By the mid-1980s when the group Dire Straits used MTV to launch its megahit “Money for Nothing” (with its own backhanded commercial tie-ins), MTV had gone international. In early 1993, its global audience stood at nearly a quarter of a billion households (60 million in the United States) with over a half billion viewers in seventy-one countries (see map, pages 106-107). The numbers esca late day by day, eclipsing CNN, which, though it is in 130 countries, boasts far fewer viewing households and speaks to yesterday’s generation of the over-forty’s rather than tomorrow’s of the under-thirty’s. MTV Europe began broadcasting in East Germany two days before the Wall came down, which, in a certain perverse sense, almost rendered the latter event superfluous.11

  Indigenous-language MTV programming is available in most countries, but although Orlando Patterson would like to think that “world musical homogenization” is simply “not occurring,” young watchers often prefer American, which is, after all, what MTV is promoting. Sumner Redstone, the owner of MTV and three times the average age of his employees there, sounds like Gillette chairman Zeien when he insists that “kids on the streets in Tokyo have more in common with kids on the streets in London than they do with their parents.”12 In Belgium, a Flemish-language MTV program was canceled and replaced by English as a result of complaints from local Flemish viewers.13 Anglo-American pop accounts for most of MTV’s music, and where local groups get airtime they generally imitate the Americans. Critic Helmut Fest complains that local European groups appearing on MTV are consigned to the “ghetto slot—a kind of ‘look-how-curious-and-quaint-these-continentals-are’ approach.”14 In Berlin, if you get tired of MTV, you can also get the best bands on David Letterman’s Late Night on another channel.

  Asia affects to go its own way, and then marches in lockstep with America. The new Asia Television Network (ATN) is nominally pursuing cultural preservation, and it has started the first all-Hindi network on the subcontinent, but it is simultaneously broadcasting MTV-Europe in order to compete with its rival, Star.15 Star has its own Asian version of MTV (with plenty of American hits), so Indians and Malaysians and Pakistanis can now choose from two “indigenous” MTV channels that offer the same bland pop American musical fare—or local imitations thereof. Once new media are in place, however conservative the cultural intentions of users, the door is wide open to the outside world.16

  MTV’s audience, united for all its ideological differences and cultural reluctance by satellite and the United Colors of Benetton, includes not just Taiwan but China, not only Israel but Iran and Saudi Arabia, secessionist Georgia as well as progressive Hungary, Brazil no less than Mexico, Bangladesh and Vietnam as well as India and Hong Kong, and, along with South Korea, North Korea too (see map, pages 106–107). Satellites have little regard for Jihad and are messengers for McWorld in the most obstinate of ethnic enclaves. One nearly hysterical Islamic youth confesses to an Iranian newspaper, “I can’t study anymore, I have become impatient, weak and nervous. I feel crippled … so vulgar and stimulating” are the images of Western TV and MTV being beamed down from satellites.17

  Music Television’s Reach Around the World

  Self-critical Americans worry about MTV’s “cultural colonialism,”18 but when the supposed targets in Eastern Europe are warned, they wave off the caveats insisting that rock music is about freedom—a weapon against both the old Communists and the new nationalists. And, of course, in the near run they are right: in today’s reactionary Beograd (Serbia), dissident radio stations like B-92 play Western rock music to signal their disdain for ethnic parochialism, much as Russian dissidents once wore jeans and smoked Winstons and spoke rock to power to unnerve their Communist masters. Just a few years ago, Bill Roedy, MTV’s European director, was writing about “being part of the process of democratization in Eastern Europe.” MTV, he enthused, “is more than a TV channel. For some audiences, we’re a connection to the rest of the world. We’re a window to the West with our free flow of information and freedom of expression.”19 Free expression, perhaps, but “information”? “Democratization”? German hate groups also groove to pop music, and supporters of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of Russia’s hard-line nationalist Liberal Democratic Party (which is anything but liberal democratic), established “Zhirinovsky’s Rock Store” for “hard-rock fans who have taken up the cause of Russian nationalism.”20

  McWorld’s videology churns out an elusive rhetoric. The old masters were tyrants as visible as they were surly, tyrants about whose illegitimacy there could be no question; the new masters are invisible, and sing a siren song of markets in which the name of liberty is invoked in every chorus. Perhaps that is why the authorities in Serbia not only tolerate B-92 but give it a favorable broadcast slot on the official radio station. The station managers insist the station is left alone so the authorities can prove their “liberalism” to the West. But perhaps those authorities recognize how little damage rock music can do to their political policies and imperialist programs. MTV succors liberty … of a kind. It is certainly good for the kind of choice entailed by consumption; but whether it is of any use to civic liberty is quite another question. It runs interviews with President Clinton, it sponsors a periodic “Rock the Vote” registration and voting campaign for young people, and like other hip advertisers, plays a game that cynics might mistake for an insincere version of political correctness.

  Others argue that this debate takes MTV far too seriously: they dismiss the network as “empty-V”—the mindless music of a generation of preadolescents who will in time
move on and up to the BBC, CNN, and NBC. Yet MTV not only shares but helps generate McWorld’s videology. A Russian producer, wondering whether cultural life in Hollywood is really an improvement on life under a repressive Stalinism, observes: “Before I had to deceive the censor; then I could shoot my film; now I am forced to look for all the money and materials myself Instead of being a revered and dominant influence in society, the writer or artist has become a mere creator of cultural values.”21

  To create the cultural values necessary to material consumption is McWorld’s first operating imperative. Thirty years ago Disney’s little sales-creatures crooned to theme park visitors, “It’s a small world, after all.” The smalling world is being dumbed down by Beavis and Butt-head and heavy metal music. Cop killer rap is hissing to restive teenage audiences around the globe that to “off” (kill) policemen is necessary, to despise women is cool, and to grow up is unnecessary—even as P.C. recording executives assure us nobody really means any of it. To be sure, MTV is a complex medium with a variety of messages: subliminally, it offers blips savoring freedom and disdaining authority (thus the appeal to resistance movements), it catalyzes consumption (thus the attraction to advertisers), it reinforces identity (we are the world!) even as it underscores differences (the Dis-United Colors of Benetton), flirts with violence and makes a (sometimes brutal) sport of sex (women are “ho’s and bitches” and men are fucking machines). It celebrates youth, encouraging a forever-infantile obliviousness that defines life in the default mode as passive consumerism. More liminally, it engages in shallow but pervasive political campaigns that are vaguely liberal and empowering though often countercultural and sometimes even scandalizing (as with black rap and hip-hop), but finally as vapid as the vacuously tendentious lyrics of its most scandalous songs.22 “Rock the vote,” it shouts, wrapping Madonna in a flag and urging youth to register. Live Aid, Free Your Mind, Choose or Lose—rock musicians flexing underdeveloped political muscles in the name of causes so safe and universal that the campaigns can do little harm though scarcely much good either.

  Political content, to be sure, is hardly a matter of carefully deliberated principle on MTV; more a question of aesthetics, taste—call it hip-hop whimsy. When in the summer of 1993, unruly New York youngsters started sexually harassing girls in the city’s overcrowded pools, Mayor David Dinkins talked rap groups into mouthing namby-pamby lyrics like “Don’t dis your sis.”23 The lyrics can sell love or hate, can preach neighborliness or urge slaughter, can call for one world, which “we are,” and can instigate paranoid fear of foreigners or cops or blacks or whites or even (the old favorite) Jews. At the very moment Madonna was wearing a flag to rock the vote, a well-known Caribbean rapper was urging listeners to off homosexuals while German skinhead groups were swaying to the rhythms of a syncopated xenophobia. The popular rapper Dr. Dre sings to rapt listeners: “Rat-a-tat-tat and a tat like that/Never hesitate to put a nigga on his back.” Just-Ice, as popular as Dr. Dre, chants about “faggots” and “bitches,” and how when they see “Just-Ice” approach “they move before they get stitches … A bullet or a bat,/Just pick it.”

  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 which controls the statesmen,” and in that he is right.28 But to think that because states have lost control of television, the “people” have acquired it is a dangerous illusion. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi came to power through control of a media monopoly through which he could sell “dreams and miracles” and pretend to be a populist.29 But the lines were clear: the people did not control Berlusconi, Berlusconi controlled the people; and Berlusconi did not control television, television controlled Berlusconi. Indeed, it finally brought him down as disinterestedly as it had raised him up. In America, it is often television that makes policy. A single picture of the abused body of an American soldier in Somalia provoked American withdrawal there, and the Pentagon is loath to take casualties nowadays not only because of the ongoing trauma of Vietnam but because of fear of the media. There is no abstract doctrine, not containment, not democracy, not anticommunism, not even imperialism, that can hold out against a video snapshot of a dying American boy.

  Some might argue this is a good thing for peace or at least for ordinary people since it is their perspective that television purveys. Television, however, purveys no images but its own. If, as Gore Vidal wrote in his brilliant odyssey through film, “he who screens the history makes the history,” it is not those whose history is up on the screen but those screening it who will be in the drivers’ seat.30 The medium has its own program driven by Hollyworld’s videology and McWorld’s corporate balance sheets and it displays American corpses neither in order to influence history nor to condition American foreign policy but to sell advertising and keep viewers glued to their sofas. “TV’s basic purpose,” writes media critic Mark Crispin Miller, “is to keep you watching,” and so the medium moves to “box in” viewers, in and out of the home, displacing their reality with its own.31 Television spreads a modest flood tide on a flat plain: its waters are everywhere, and though it makes a shallow-bedded sea, and though there are tradition
al landmarks—newspaper trees and book steeples and many a beckoning print rooftop—millions lose their way and slip under the shimmering images without anyone quite noticing, least of all they themselves. Children have been known to drown in just a few inches of water: television’s shallows are more perilous still.