BY BEN WINTERS
MTV, which once upon a time was supposed to be a revolutionary music channel, is meeting the challenges of war in its own inimitable fashion; it’s censoring its play lists and sending veteran anchor Kurt Loder to sneer at Michael Moore’s Oscar night activism.
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As Jason Deans wrote in the UK’s Guardian on March 27, "MTV has banned music videos with war-related titles, lyrics or images." That includes not only the obvious things, like the song "Bombs Over Baghdad" by Outkast but also "Boom!" by System of a Down, which is actually explicitly anti-war. (The video just happens to be directed by Michael Moore.)
The list of prohibited tunes also includes a bunch of stuff you’d never think to censor, unless you were a craven television executive desperate not to offend the delicate sensibilities of hip-hoppin’ 12 year olds–or, more to the point, the delicate sensibilities of your corporate advertisers.
Hence, MTV has also pulled–"for the duration of the war"–"Aerosmith’s 'Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,’ which features footage from the asteroid disaster movie Armageddon; Radiohead’s 'Invasion;’ 'You, Me and World War Three’ by Gavin Friday, and anything by the B52s," reported the Guardian.
Fred Schneider of that last group waxed comically offended in the pages of the New York Times: "I guess MTV doesn’t have a research department, because from Day 1 I’ve said in interviews that our name is a slang term for the bouffant hairdo Kate and Cindy used to wear–nothing to do with bombers." Sorry, Rock Lobster, MTV is taking no chances. That Radiohead song they’re not going to play, for example, apparently doesn’t even exist. "Oddly, the memo also mentions 'Invasion’ by Radiohead," says Neil Strauss’ Times story, "although a spokesman for the band said he was unaware of any song by the group with that title."
"MTV News," meanwhile, is earning kudos simply for not ignoring the war. "Refuting conventional wisdom that its teen and 20-something audience doesn’t care about international affairs, the cable-television channel has actively blended its usual music videos with war coverage, in its own distinctive style," said the Wall Street Journal on March 27. "And ratings are rising." Does this mean today’s kids would rather watch a war than an Outkast video? Only time will tell.
Inevitably, MTV’s choice to give the war full coverage creates some interesting headlines on MTV.com, like "Massive Attack Hold Minute Silence For Iraqis" (Massive Attack is a band).
Oh yes, and here’s the Oscar night report from the snide Kurt Loder: "[Michael] Moore brought all of the losing nominees in his category up onstage with him as a show of 'solidarity’…But Moore’s spittle-flecked ululations were so over-the-top, that even the Oscar crowd–his natural constituency, you might think–erupted in a storm of boos."
OK, Kurt, we get it. You hate people who care about stuff. I’d rather hear what Fred Schneider thinks.
More On Moore
"Late last week, at another awards show [the Independent Spirit Awards], Moore said that if he won the Oscar, he would either refer to Bush’s "fictitious" presidency or would pass his allotted 45 seconds at the mike in silence," according to the Miami Herald, which had a follow up to the Moore fracas on March 25.
But silence would have been out of the question for the microphone-obsessed documentarian, so instead he did indeed take his chance to call "President Bush 'a fictitious president’ waging a war 'for fictitious reasons,’ and then went on to chastise him with, 'Shame on you, Mr. Bush. Shame on you!’"
According to the Herald and several other papers, Hollywood is "abuzz over Moore’s anti-war harangue." Good, Hollywood needed something to be abuzz about.
But don’t think everyone out there in movieland is as progressive and spittle-flecked as Moore. Ben Stein, for one–you may remember him as the exceedingly dry-inflected teacher from Ferris Bueller–defended his fellow Hollywood conservatives in the LA Times. "'There are not many conservative voices in Hollywood, certainly among the stars…but if you’re backstage, you hear a lot of sound people, makeup people and grips who are mostly supportive of President Bush. Even if they’re making $100,000 a week, actors like to think of themselves as rebels.’"
Also opining in the LA Times recently was our fake president, Martin Sheen, defending the rights of activist celebrities. In an op-ed piece, from which many quotes were pulled and distributed on the AP wire, Sheen accused the world of celebrityism, that is, denying he and his fellow Beverly Hills rabble-rousers the right to speak "solely due to our celebrity status."
Everybody deserves to be heard, Sheen wrote, be they "celebrity, or diplomat, cab driver or student."
Does he know that cab drivers are rarely invited to contribute to the LA Times’ op-ed page?
But Just Because You Torture Someone In It, Does That Make It Art?
Torture and POWs are, unfortunately, among the hot topics of this war. So it’s a bit surprising more outlets didn’t pick up the AP story on Friday, March 28, detailing new revelations about a weird footnote to 20th century European history: the use by communist insurgents of abstract art to create creepy-deepy cells during the Spanish Civil War.
"One wall was curved, and others were painted with circles, cubes, slanted lines, spirals, checkerboards and other shapes," is how one such cell is described in the article. "By night a blinding red spotlight made it all appear to move and pulsate. Sense of time and distance crumbled."
Such cells were created, according to historians, by "a double-agent Frenchman named Alfonso Laurencic…a musician and painter. As there was little abstract art in Spain in the 1930s…Laurencic must have traveled around Europe and learned about avant-garde painting before he got caught up in Spain’s war."
Avant-garde music would have been worse.