Rock and television

Think of rock and television as one of those couples plainly destined to get together but often at odds until the shotgun wedding arranged by MTV (Music TeleVision) finally got them to the altar in 1981. From the start, which in this case means Elvis Presley, TV in the United States and Britain functioned—or tried to—as a taming influence on the music’s unruly streak. Famously, Presley’s gyrations were obscured by waist-up shots during his TV debut on the Dorsey Brothers’ Stage Show in 1956, an emasculation that proved emblematic of the relation between the two as rock fans long perceived it. Television was domesticated, family-oriented, and basically wholesome if not oppressively straitlaced; rock was freewheeling, youth-oriented, and basically insolent if not thrillingly dissolute. Tensions were inevitable, even if antagonism was commercially impractical.

As indeed it was. If only because they shared a market—the emerging baby boomer audience—rock and roll and TV were linked from the start. In the United States Presley’s ascent to nationwide stardom in 1956 owed a great deal to his TV appearances, above all on The Ed Sullivan Show; the following year Ricky (later Rick) Nelson, one of the two sons on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, began to perform rock-and-roll numbers regularly on the series, with the nicely symbiotic result that TV exposure boosted his record sales even as his music making became central to the show’s continuing popularity. From very early on, TV also provided showcases devoted entirely to the new music, the most prominent early examples being Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in the United States, which began as a local Philadelphia program in 1952 before going national five years later, and Juke Box Jury in the United Kingdom, which premiered in 1959.

Beatlemania, which spread to the United States and exploded with the “mop tops’” early 1964 Ed Sullivan appearance, marked a new phase in the relationship between rock and television. In the heyday of British Invasion pop, a variety of new TV venues emerged to purvey what was, simply, too much fun to be defined as strictly kid stuff, even if it was essentially youth music—Ready Steady Go! and Top of the Pops in Britain, Shindig! and Hullaballoo across the Atlantic. Yet within a few years the emergence of the counterculture created a schism between the pop that TV could accommodate and the rock identified with hippies and radical politics.

From the Monkees to the Archies—two bands each with its own TV show, one an industry concoction and the other literally a cartoon—television’s role in packaging and promoting innocuous music for teens and subteens grew more prominent, reaching satori of sorts with The Partridge Family (1970–74), the launching platform for the 1970s’ definitive bubblegum idol, David Cassidy. But TV’s halfhearted attempts to showcase other, less sanitizable forms of rock, most prominently Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert (1973–82), satisfied nobody, although by the late 1970s Saturday Night Live’s musical guest slot was providing crucial American exposure for a number of new wave-identified performers, including Elvis Costello, Devo, and the B-52’s. In black music, where counterculture-style distinctions between art and showbiz were rarely made (even by or regarding groundbreaking performers such as Sly and the Family Stone), the story was different. Soul Train, the most important black-themed music show, premiered in 1971 and long both enjoyed and conferred a prestige for which there was no white rock-TV equivalent.

The rise of rock video completely transformed—and, from the early 1980s on, defined—the relation between rock music and TV. No less important than video itself, however, was another technological development: cable TV, which vastly increased viewing options, making it profitable to target segmented audiences, thus putting an end to broadcast TV’s homogenizing tendency. This also coincided with the waning of rock’s distinctive antishowbiz cachet and its assimilation into the entertainment mainstream. Whereas the music remained identified with rebellion as a stance if nothing else, later generations of rock fans saw no special paradox in their revolutions’ being televised. All the same, this brave new world didn’t erupt overnight. MTV early and cautiously pursued its own brand of homogeneity, all but excluding black performers until the success of Michael Jackson’s Thriller made such musical apartheid impossible to sustain; later MTV grudgingly accommodated such genres as hip-hop and the postpunk offshoots gathered under the umbrella term alternative. The MTV network’s creation of the classic rock VH1 channel, which effectively defined white baby boomers—once “the” rock audience—as a specialized enclave, left MTV free to present a more varied bill of fare. Even so, in the mid-1990s MTV began to experiment with a variety of nonmusical programming to keep its edge, only to swing back to emphasizing videos toward the decade’s end to keep its audience.