"My favorite viewing, and this is the first time I have ever admitted it to anyone, but what I love to do, when I don’t watch evangelicals, when I can’t read or write and can’t go out walking, and don’t want to just tear my hair and destroy myself, I put on, here in New Haven, cable channel thirteen and I watch rock television endlessly.
"As a sheer revelation of the American religion it’s overwhelming. Yes, I like to watch the dancing girls too. The sex part of it is fine. Occasionally it’s musically interesting, but you know, ninety-nine out of a hundred groups are just bilge. And there hasn’t been any good American rock since, alas, The Band disbanded.
"I watch MTV endlessly, my dear, because what is going on there, not just in the lyrics but in its whole ambience, is the real vision of what the country needs and desires. It’s the image of reality that it sees, and it’s quite weird and wonderful. It confirms exactly these two points: first, that no matter how many are on the screen at once, not one of them feels free except in total self-exaltation. And second, it comes through again and again in the lyrics and the way one dances, the way one moves, that what is best and purest in one is just no part of the creation—that myth of an essential purity before and beyond experience never goes away. It’s quite fascinating"
Harold Bloom, 1991
Reminds me in a way of one of the fuddy-duddies in my graduate architecture program (the year was also 1991, the codger in question being Robert Maxwell) going on in a seminar about how he "got" MTV and that it didn't need to be explained to him. "It's just a series of random images, you see, and the music is the linear thread that holds them all together. Why, it's quite architectural, now, isn't it?"
ReplyDeleteHaha! I would love to know what Bloom thought were the 1% of non-bilge groups on MTV in 1991. None of them American rock bands, apparently. Primal Scream? Maybe catching MBV on '120 Minutes'? Or A Tribe Called Quest on 'Yo! MTV Raps'?
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