"T.V. Eye" is not about television, of course.
T.V. has a particular private slang meaning in Stoogesworld and to be honest, I would advise you not to look it up, it might subtly impair your enjoyment of the song as it has ever-so-slightly with me, which is a shame as it is a Top 10 all time rock song for me.
Somehow I've only just got around to hearing Los Microwaves, despite Barney Hoskyns going on about them in the NME back in the day.
They are None New Wavier that's for sure.
"TV In My Eye" is yet another example of the very low status of television in the cultural hierarchy back then, compared to nowadays.
From punkers to highbrow literati, all agreed that it was nonstop garbage, rotting your brain.
cheeky monkeys, Rezillos, going on Top of the Pops and taking the mickey out of it!
Gil Scott Heron obviously...
What else?
(Talking Heads being clever semi-invert the idea and in "Found A Job" have the characters making their own television)
"Damn that television, what a bad picture"
"Don't get upset, it's not a major disaster"
"There's nothing on tonight, " he said, "I don't know what's the matter"
"Nothing's ever on, " she said, "so I don't know why you bother"
We've heard this little scene, we've heard it many times
People fighting over little things and wasting precious time
They might be better off, I think, the way it seems to me
Making up their own shows, which might be better than TV
Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations
They've enlisted all their family
They've enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again
Their show gets real high ratings, they think they have a hit
There might even be a spin-off, but they're not sure 'bout that
If they ever watch TV again, it'd be too soon for them
Bob never yells about the picture now, he's having too much fun
Judy's in the bedroom, inventing situations
Bob is on the street today, scouting up locations
They've enlisted all their family
They've enlisted all their friends
It helped save their relationship
And made it work again
So think about this little scene, apply it to your life
If your work isn't what you love, then something isn't right
Just think of Bob and Judy, they're happy as can be
Inventing situations, putting them on TV
(No quite the total inversion of rock convention as with "Don't Worry About the Government" but different than railing against the braindeath)
Most rock songs, the attitude to television is on the level of Network and Being There, or Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and his short stories like "The Pedestrian", or Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death i.e. typical highbrow "admass" critique of the brainwashing machine in the living room
Ironic, in a way, given that your highbrow literati like J.B. Priestley would have lumped rock'n'roll and youth culture in with TV, supermarkets, advertising, etc as part of admass.
Now, are there any pro-TV songs?
I have never really inspected closely the lyrics to ZZ Top's "TV Dinners"
Mustn’t forget “Television, The Drug Of The Nation” by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and “Channel Zero” by Public Enemy!
ReplyDeleteAs for pro…nothing that isn’t caked in irony. ”Coffee and TV” by Blur? How about “Satellite of Love” by Lou Reed?
One kinda-sorta paean to TV, especially if you watch the accompanying video, is Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now.”
My favorite lyric about TV is from “Tania”, Camper Van Beethoven’s song about Patty Hearst:
My beloved Tania
We carry your gun deep within our hearts
For no better reason than our lives have no meaning
And we want to be on television
David Lowery skewered a generation with that lyric.
Absolutely, I forgot about "Channel Zero".
DeleteI just read Joshua Clover's 1989: Bob Dylan Didn't Have This To Sing About book after his death and it's full of interesting ideas but strangely doesn't mention the one thing that always struck me as funny about the Jesus Jones song, which is that he's saying "right here, right now / there's other place I'd rather be" - but he's not actually "right there" where History is being made, he's watching on TV, far from the action, utterly vicarious.
It's a great song though, the only Jesus Jones tune I like.
I suppose now I think about it, much of the entire genre of hauntology is a tribute to television - spooky children's TV of the British Seventies, Public Information Films etc. The very name Ghost Box is a trope for the television.
Right! There’s supreme irony in saying ‘right here right now’ when you’re commenting on a world-historical event seen on tape delay. (I’m sure Joshua could have written 50,000 highly entertaining words on the subject, though, space permitting.) But I watched the fall of the USSR on A 13” RCA television in my bedroom and I can attest to the truth of that song and that moment. JJ got it right, at least in a documentary sense. I recall that’s exactly what it felt like. I just really, really hated those fucking painters hats.
DeleteIn the spirit of the Ghost Box comment, if you widen the parameters for TV tributes, perhaps mention can be made of Morrissey’s affection for British TV, manifested in a few sleeve images and interview remarks (e.g. Yootha Joyce, “Coronation Street”, etc).
Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star" seems to be accusing television of something or other.
ReplyDeleteIn that Liz Phair song on her second album, the line about doing it doggy style so they can both watch TV while they fuck seems to be implying some kind of decadence. Or at least a hollow relationship.
DeleteMeanwhile in televisual depictions of sex, they almost invariably choose positions where you can see both actor's faces.
Kubrick was an admirer of TV commercials. “With the editing, photography and...you know, I mean, eight frame cuts, just beautiful, and you realize in 30 seconds they've created an impression of something rather complex, and I haven't done it and no one else has...the ultimate way of telling its own story would have more to do with TV commercials than it does to the way they are presently told, the economy of statement and the kind of visual poetry.’
DeleteWhat would a Kubrickian 30-second televisual depiction of sex look like? If you got Madison Avenue’s best on the job? What positions? What close-ups? What precision editing to produce what effect? One thing’s for sure, the output could never be titillating, it would only be purely, embarrassingly, beautifully comic.
TVC 15 is an....er....interesting one.
ReplyDeleteStrange Days references the omnipresence of television.
Television's Over by The Adverts, whose singer was TV Smith.
The Tubes LP that features "TV is King" is practically a concept album about the addictive medium and its detrimental effects on society, as of course depicted on the incredible cover image. Of course, the back of the album shows the band as participants on The Hollywood Squares game show, which ultimately became a reality when they appeared as contestants on the show in the wake of the album's PR campaign, so who knows what their message really was.
ReplyDeleteIt's a great cover. I'm not sure I ever listened to it, although I covered The Tubes in the glam book. They kept it going - even their UK hit "Prime Time", which is basically a love song or song of desire, uses the televisual framing.
DeleteMaybe I'm misremembering, but didn't some mega-corporation or another unironically use "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" in a *televised* ad not terribly long ago?
ReplyDeleteMTV had The Revolution Will Be Televised, in the wake of Rock the Vote / Choose or Loose seemingly helping Clinton get elected, and also the whole grunge / alternative thing.
Deletebut yeah i'm sure you are right and some corp misused it, rings a bell
DeleteB-52s had "Channel Z" but disappointingly it's an anti-TV song that Springsteen would approve of. Only a year after Public Enemy's "Channel Zero" too.
ReplyDeleteWell even more specific than songs about TV, there are songs about MTV like Dire Straits "Money for Nothing" or anti-MTV like Replacements "Seen Your Video"
ReplyDelete“MTV Get Off The Air”, Dead Kennedys.
DeleteIs Action Time Vision by Alternative TV about the telly?
ReplyDeleteUtterly crap band, tbh. Execrable.
There are also songs about specific TV shows, Iron Maiden "The Prisoner", Rush "The Twilight Zone", etc. Guessing there must be a plethora of songs about Star Trek.
ReplyDeleteYes there is Spizz’s “Where’s Captain Kirk?” . He did another one about Spock i think.
DeleteTV Personalities did songs about the Avengers and I think the Prisoner. And Cleaners from Venus did one that at least namechecked one of the characters in The Man from UNCLE.
Star trekking, across the universe...
DeletePro-TV? Perhaps obliquely, 21st Century Boy by Sigue Sigue Sputnik seems to extol the vulgarity of television, which of course is entirely in keeping with SSS's aesthetic of vulgarity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFouFuNgBRw
ReplyDeleteHere are the lyrics and the single cover, a cover rather on the nose for the theme of venerating TV: https://genius.com/Sigue-sigue-sputnik-21st-century-boy-lyrics
On the other side, I don't think anyone's yet mentioned Zappa's I'm the Slime.
Did Kraftwerk make any TV-themed tunes? None are jumping to mind.
Yeah that's a good one, the Sigue - and the cover
DeleteI feel like Marilyn Manson ripped off that Sigue cover in one of his videos, or perhaps came up with the same idea - being crucified on a cross of TVs. But I might be misremembering that. It was when he was a heavy handed critique of fame culture and bringing a bit of a glammy feel to the music
Ah I wasn't completely wrong - for the Rock Is Dead tour, "the shows began with Manson entering last, among the band, affixed to a metal crucifix made out of television sets. For this introduction, the short instrumental track "Inauguration of the Mechanical Christ" was crafted to play in the background as the TV crucifix rose from the understage. Once the complete band began the first song, the crucifix was set ablaze."
DeleteNot a song, but U2’s Zoo TV tour, conceptualised by Brian Eno, did embrace multi-channel television as its central theme. It was not really either critical or celebratory; more just: “this is the world we live in now”.
ReplyDeleteIt is grimly funny that that was what we thought of as “information overload” back in those days.
Really surprised to not find a pro-TV song anywhere in the Alice Cooper catalog. He was famously both a TV and beer addict, and in one of the books about him at the time (the Bob Greene one, I think) he recounted how he would typically write his lyrics while camped out on front of the tube, a case of Budweiser and the latest copy of Playboy at his side. "You and Me" does have that "we share a bed, some lovin' and TV" line though.
ReplyDeleteYeah he loved watching TV... old Hollywood singing-and-dancing movies like Hellzapoppin' and West Side Story... Westerns
DeleteRamones and Dictators were big consumers of TV I think
ReplyDeleteRe the low ranking of TV in the arts hierarchy... this held all through the '70s, despite exceptions like the BBC's Play for Today series, Dennis Potter, I Claudius... or the big cultural series like Civilisation and The Shock of the New...
One reason I reckon this was so is because there was virtually no serious TV criticism then. Clive James was an innovator to an extent, which his column in one of the Sunday papers. But it was written in a very light style, humorous more than making great claims. (We got hold of copy of one of his TV writing anthologies - and it was pretty thin, frothy, arch stuff).
The first things I can remember reading that took TV half-way seriously - and that even semi-justified the couch potato, vegetative style of watching - were in the NME, there was a column called Dangerous Visions that the writers took turns to do, a survey of the gold and the dross with the latter much more preponderant. But Penman would write about the greatness - or dependable superior pleasures, let's say - of the Rockford Files.
And NME would have the occasional profile of an auteur TV playwright or series writer.
But for the most part - and especially in America - television was equated with brain death.
And you can see why - the vast preponderance of its output was shitcoms, soap opera, plodding costume dramas, procedurals (cop show or mysteries where each episode is self-contained plot, the crime solved and the whodunnit turned to hedunnit within a neatly wrapped up slice of time). Variety shows, celebrity games shows, non-celebrity games shows. Talk shows.
Interspersed, in America (or in the UK if it was ITV) by idiotic commercials.
Actually often the commercials in the UK were more entertaining than the programs. American commercials (I've tried watching the YouTube collations of the US ones) were much less sophisticated and amusing, although perhaps that's because seeing them now is not refracted through nostalgia like it is when I watch the UK collations of 70s or early 80s commercials).
Yes - before you object - there WERE some quality, super well written, super well-acted comedies from the UK... Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, Dad's Army, Porridge, Fawlty Towers ("this is as good as Shakespeare" - S.Reynolds) , Ripping Yarns, Steptoe and Son, Rising Damp. Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin...
DeleteBut as David Stubbs's Different Times book shows amply, the good comedy was vastly outnumbered by the cack - often racist, sexist, homophobic cack too
Dick Emery...