This Just In: Music Still Works Audio-Only

Was that MTV slogan “You’ll never look at music the same way again” a prophecy or a death knell?

ITEM: Paramount Global announced last week that it would shutter most of MTV’s music television programming in the UK. It plans to retain only the flagship channel MTV, which for more than a decade has been primarily a purveyor of reality TV programming, not music videos. Paramount indicated that its portfolio of MTV channels in the U.S. would continue – for now. Similar closures are anticipated in other parts of the world, including Australia, Poland, France and Brazil.

What followed that announcement was an extravagant full-course memory lane meal, involving statements from sad former on-air personalities – VJs! – commenting on the end of an era, fond culture-study discourses on groundbreaking videos by Madonna, Prince and Michael Jackson, and wry appraisals from pundits who observed, with a necessary spritz of caustic humor, how streaming killed the video star. (Cue the Daniel Ek dancing video!)

In other words, the media did what it always does with a death: It cranked up remembrances and think pieces about the “impact” of the channel and music video more broadly. As noted sneer purveyor Billy Idol recalled, MTV “pissed off a lot of musicians who weren’t visual types, dancers or performers.”

Other artists recalled holding their noses while dutifully going through the motions for the cameras. Here’s Andy Summers, the guitarist of the Police, from an old interview re-quoted in the Guardian: “I don’t like any of our videos. We were always made to look bright and inoffensive and appealing.” He and his bandmates might not have enjoyed the experience of making videos or the final product, but they couldn’t deny the role video played in the marketing. Police drummer Stewart Copeland framed it perfectly: “We [the band and MTV] joyfully exploited each other all the way to the bank.”

As I read the lamentations, I kept returning to the same nagging thought: Sure, it was a near-perfect marketing vehicle. MTV helped audiences see what stars looked like. Just as TikTok does today, it propelled dance moves and fashion ideas into viral worldwide phenomena.

But since we’re stepping back and taking a long look: What did the lavish visuals really add to the experience of music? And what did music video as a form do to music? To the auditory processing skills of the music audience?

Nobody was asking these questions in the months after MTV debuted in 1981. From its gawky early days, the channel offered a new way to discover and engage with music. There was a breathless enthusiasm about it, and many artists, including Idol and Duran Duran, rose to its creative challenges. They began to approach songs as miniature films, casting themselves as heroes or villians or alien monsters – in many cases imposing specific stories on lyrics that by themselves offered multiple opaque and open-ended “meanings.”

And….we the music-loving public ate it up. Unquestioningly. Swallowed the hooks, the elaborate cast-of-thousands line dances, all of it. Covering music in the 1980s sometimes meant encountering a hotly anticipated release first via music video, often weeks before the music itself was made available. Along with many critics, I grumbled about this method of discovery, but if I wanted to get any story, there was no choice but to play along. (It got worse later, as the major labels found it necessary to control access to advance music; one method was to invite critics to listen in conference rooms at label offices. Even this involved negotiation: Would it be possible to listen more than once? Could we ask to have a track repeated if necessary?).

Having a first encounter with unfamiliar music through video felt, to me anyway, like a part of the associative magic of sound was being taken away. With music videos, the listener’s imagination becomes secondary to the auteur’s notion of what the piece is supposed to “look” like. It could register as a limiting of possibilities, if not a suspension of agency, a surrender. Here we are now, entertain us.

Then there was this: It could be damned difficult to erase that first impression. You’d be sitting in deep space with a record, and when the single came on, it would often automatically trigger a flood of images from the video. An unwelcome narrative overlay. Could it be that when the first contact is through the eyes, the brain retains the information differently, prioritizing the visual?

Turns out there’s a study on that, from the University of Finland, published in 2022 in the academic journal Music and Science. It’s called “Exploring Music Video Experiences and Their Influence on Music Perception.”

Though it focused on a small sample size, it used various metrics to explore the way young people (median age: 22) process music video, and how it shapes their perceptions of the sounds. The study focused on what the authors classified as four temporal stages: Intention, Attention, Reaction, and Retention. Of those, Retention is the most revealing: This part of the study traced the “carry-over effects” of music videos, and found that 76% of respondents recalled imagery from the music video in subsequent audio-only listening.

That’s mind-control territory!

I’d argue that the fixed nature of the visuals in music videos go beyond short-circuiting the listener’s imagination. On repeat listening, the narrative familiarity of the “story” actively encourages a muted level of engagement, a “we know how this goes” numbness. After all, it’s a rerun.

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Fortunately, just as we can choose to be guardians of our serenity (and our democracy!), we can re-take control of the precious, underappreciated, frequently trampled and entirely personal flights of imagination sparked by sound. How? Simply by listening to music without without visual input, without scrolling or multitasking. Hey, it worked for Bach and the countless generations of music lovers who’ve absorbed, on a cellular level, his masterpieces!

Here’s a modest proposal inspired by the fusillade of marketing around Deliver Me From Nowhere, the just-released film chronicling the making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska: Mute the internet, dim the lights and just listen to the 1982 album from top to bottom. That’s an intense 40-minute ride. The film is, of course, longer in duration; it’s a context story, and like A Complete Unknown many other recent films about popular music, it explores the scenes going on around Springsteen at the time, and the internal artmaking struggles that led him to turn left into an unexpected and almost mythical work.

The extensive archival audio Springsteen shared on Nebraska ‘82 includes demos and outtakes (including several working versions of “Born In the U.S.A.” and a spectacularly spare “Pink Cadillac”), the entire “Electric Nebraska” cut at the time with members of the E Street Band, and a live performance from earlier this year. All that stuff is worth hearing; all of it derives its resonance from the hovering intimate vibe of the original release.

Nebraska is moods and auras as much as words and music. It speaks to myth and disillusionment. It evokes the sound of fading dreams and what replaces them — a harsh odd-lot bare-shelves dollar-store kind of emptiness. Lots of it occurs in shadow, with murky sounds drifting through the upper atmosphere like ghost tones in an abandoned church, haunting the periphery of consciousness.

Through that spare sonic tableaux, Springsteen takes his listeners deep. He describes people who’ve been roughed-up by life and are out on desperate rides, using gas-station maps to clean the chicken grease from their fingers. Yet even when his imagery is that gloriously specific, the sounds don’t simply tell you what this protagonist looks like, what he wears. Instead the details help bring the listener into a soul state, an inner isolation, a fitful mindscape where some sort of reckoning is in progress. This Springsteen evokes through the lyrics, yes, but that’s just the beginning. The art of Nebraska springs from the way the rawness in the text rattles around in the abrasive imperfect sonics; in the heavy sighs and shrieks that speak a language of desperation beyond words; in the things we sense deeply but can’t ever hope to see. That’s where music lives.