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maggierachael 's review for:
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution
by Rob Tannenbaum, Craig Marks
This book is truly one of the biggest, unmitigated disasters I’ve ever seen.
I’m not a huge fan of oral histories to begin with, and this one just proves exactly why they falter as a format. It drags on for well over five hundred pages, and with the exception of a few chapter introductions, the bulk of it was a series of unconnected, out of context quotes from everybody and their mother that was even vaguely connected to the music business. They clearly valued quantity over quality when it came to their material, as so many oral histories do. Instead of molding their quotes into a narrative, it’s a constant barrage of direct quotes from over 400 sources. It feels almost lazy, structuring it like that when you have so much raw material that you’re trying to fit into one book.
And it was clear that it was raw material — I saw more than one name misspelled, including Freddie Mercury’s, and lots of misspellings of place names and inaccurate or contradictory information. Lots of it jumps from one story to another with no transition, so you feel lost most of the time trying to keep up with it. Live Aid gets half of a very short chapter, while bullshit business antics and men being pigs get thirty or forty page chapters in numbers. I unabashedly skimmed entire chapters because they either droned on and on or bored me half to death. It was a hot mess structurally, with almost no real connective tissue to keep it all together.
And I hesitate to trust oral histories in the first place because stuff can be taken so out of context. Most of the responses in this book were pretty well-rounded, but then you’d get random single-sentence comments from artists like Adam Ant or Kathy Valentine, that seem to only tangentially connect to the topic at hand, and then they never appear in the book again. It makes me wonder if they just really wanted to have those big names in the book, but didn’t have anything substantial to work with, so they just plucked a random sentence from the content they had and shoved it in out of context.
(I know for a fact that Adam notoriously hasn’t done many interviews since the 90s, and that other oral histories published around 2011-2012 have lifted quotes of his wholesale from external sources without his knowledge. Maybe that’s why I don’t like oral histories that much — who’s to say some of these artists even gave their consent to appear in this book?)
To that end, I’m disgusted with the way the authors allowed women to be portrayed in this book. Practically every anecdote from every male featured in the book has something to do with putting some woman or another down, insulting her or calling her a slut or an airhead because it’s “funny”. It isn’t — it’s misogynistic, it’s condescending, and it’s downright unacceptable for a book published in 2011. I don’t care if it involve stories from “before people knew any better”. There’s an anecdote concerning Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons — a lovely woman, on all accounts — that’s unbelievably degrading in the interest of playing up the “sex drugs and rock and roll” angle. They even go so far as to actually print her statement declining to comment — “I’m not interested in being interviewed”. Again, how am I to trust this source when they’re pulling stunts like that? The men featured in this book are absolute pigs and I damn near quit then and there, and that was barely a quarter of the way into the book.
“Girls belong in cages”? Fuck you.
And that’s not even addressing the fact that many of the MTV heads interviewed for this book are clearly massively racist. Everybody knows the clip of Bowie calling MTV the fuck *out* for not playing black artists, and he was right. They play up all kinds of excuses for it in this book, but it’s so thinly veiled it’s not even funny. Just say you didn’t want black artists on your network and get out.
“I Want My MTV” has almost nothing to do with what it advertises. Racist, misogynistic, cynical, and not worth your time if you’ve got a braincell in your head.
I’m not a huge fan of oral histories to begin with, and this one just proves exactly why they falter as a format. It drags on for well over five hundred pages, and with the exception of a few chapter introductions, the bulk of it was a series of unconnected, out of context quotes from everybody and their mother that was even vaguely connected to the music business. They clearly valued quantity over quality when it came to their material, as so many oral histories do. Instead of molding their quotes into a narrative, it’s a constant barrage of direct quotes from over 400 sources. It feels almost lazy, structuring it like that when you have so much raw material that you’re trying to fit into one book.
And it was clear that it was raw material — I saw more than one name misspelled, including Freddie Mercury’s, and lots of misspellings of place names and inaccurate or contradictory information. Lots of it jumps from one story to another with no transition, so you feel lost most of the time trying to keep up with it. Live Aid gets half of a very short chapter, while bullshit business antics and men being pigs get thirty or forty page chapters in numbers. I unabashedly skimmed entire chapters because they either droned on and on or bored me half to death. It was a hot mess structurally, with almost no real connective tissue to keep it all together.
And I hesitate to trust oral histories in the first place because stuff can be taken so out of context. Most of the responses in this book were pretty well-rounded, but then you’d get random single-sentence comments from artists like Adam Ant or Kathy Valentine, that seem to only tangentially connect to the topic at hand, and then they never appear in the book again. It makes me wonder if they just really wanted to have those big names in the book, but didn’t have anything substantial to work with, so they just plucked a random sentence from the content they had and shoved it in out of context.
(I know for a fact that Adam notoriously hasn’t done many interviews since the 90s, and that other oral histories published around 2011-2012 have lifted quotes of his wholesale from external sources without his knowledge. Maybe that’s why I don’t like oral histories that much — who’s to say some of these artists even gave their consent to appear in this book?)
To that end, I’m disgusted with the way the authors allowed women to be portrayed in this book. Practically every anecdote from every male featured in the book has something to do with putting some woman or another down, insulting her or calling her a slut or an airhead because it’s “funny”. It isn’t — it’s misogynistic, it’s condescending, and it’s downright unacceptable for a book published in 2011. I don’t care if it involve stories from “before people knew any better”. There’s an anecdote concerning Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons — a lovely woman, on all accounts — that’s unbelievably degrading in the interest of playing up the “sex drugs and rock and roll” angle. They even go so far as to actually print her statement declining to comment — “I’m not interested in being interviewed”. Again, how am I to trust this source when they’re pulling stunts like that? The men featured in this book are absolute pigs and I damn near quit then and there, and that was barely a quarter of the way into the book.
“Girls belong in cages”? Fuck you.
And that’s not even addressing the fact that many of the MTV heads interviewed for this book are clearly massively racist. Everybody knows the clip of Bowie calling MTV the fuck *out* for not playing black artists, and he was right. They play up all kinds of excuses for it in this book, but it’s so thinly veiled it’s not even funny. Just say you didn’t want black artists on your network and get out.
“I Want My MTV” has almost nothing to do with what it advertises. Racist, misogynistic, cynical, and not worth your time if you’ve got a braincell in your head.