ABSTRACT
I have criticized these ideas elsewhere (Goodwin, 1987a), and do not wish to take up much space here to repeat my argument. The objections to the postmodern interpretation of music television can engage with its reading of the relation between film theory and music videos, its near-total neglect of the music itself, its failure to locate the clips adequately within the context of pop-music culture, or its superficial understanding of pastiche. Here I will just note one of the major empirical problems: MTV itself has spent the years since the emergence of postmodern theory blatantly defying the terms of postmodernity. While there are superficial parallels, such as the creation of a category of ‘postmodern video’ (which I will discuss later), the organization of both the video clips and the MTV text itself has been increasingly traditional and convention-bound. Most notably, it is strange to discover that a media form whose postmodernity was supposedly secured partly through its 24-hour ‘flow’ and abandonment of traditional scheduling practices, has-over the last five years-progressively established rigid program slots and begun utilizing the routine practices of TV scheduling, often around the deployment of conventional broadcast-TV genres.
