ABSTRACT
Not so very long ago, back in the eighties, or “The Big ’80s” as one short-lived videorevival show liked to call them, MTV provided fruitful ground for the pop-minded scholar. The music video was, in fact, often considered the ideal mass-cultural artifact. In an essay titled “Fatal Distractions: MTV Meets Postmodern Theory,” contained in Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader, Andrew Goodwin notes several of MTV’s key traits-“its fusion of high art and popular cultural discourses (or perhaps more accurately, its refusal to acknowledge such cultural boundaries),” its play with and against narrative, its predilection for borrowing and intertextuality-although Goodwin ultimately argues against a singular analytical take on the field.
