ABSTRACT
More so than any cultural form developed in the last twenty years, music video clips and distribution systems like MTV have found themselves associated almost exclusively with one cluster of intellectual concerns. This theoretical paradigm is postmodernism, and it has fast become the academic orthodoxy in communications and cultural studies research concerning music television. Postmodern critics see in MTV a mirror-image of the ideal postmodern text: ‘Fragmentation, segmentation, superficiality, stylistic jumbling, the blurring of mediation and reality, the collapse of past and future into the moment of the present, the elevation of hedonism, the dominance of the visual over the verbal…’ (Tetzlaff 1986). The emergence in August 1988 of a programme entitled Post Modern MTV would seem to be the final confirmation of the intimate ties between the text and the theory.
