'Money for Nothing' catalogs history of the music video
Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video From the Beatles to the White Stripes, By Saul Austerlitz, Continuum, 250 pp., $24.95
MTV, the music channel that marked its 25th anniversary last August, is most noted these days for its distinct scarcity of the very thing upon which it was founded -- the music video. But forget the reality programming and prank shows that have epitomized the cable network's recent past: MTV will go down in pop history as the Trojan horse that smuggled avant-garde filmmaking into the mainstream.
To Steven Johnson, author of "Everything Bad Is Good for You," the quick-cut editing technique infamously popularized by the network taught the eye "to tolerate chaos . . . the way the ear learned to appreciate distortion in music a generation before." It's a keen observation that Johnson makes in his book in passing, in a section on the increasing complexity of video games. "Money for Nothing," a new history of music video as an art form, could use a little of that insight.
Saul Austerlitz, a Globe contributor who has also written for Film Comment and holds a master's degree in cinema studies, has done yeoman's work in examining the development of the music video, loosely organizing his book into sections on elaborate fantasy worlds, concert-performance clichés, hip -hop's infusion of bling, and other trends. Had the author personalized his research -- "One Man's Quest to Find the Perfect Music Video," or something -- it could have been as entertaining as a "Sledgehammer."
As it stands, "Money for Nothing" is a catalog of video content that rarely ventures beyond frame-by-frame descriptions of notable entries in the form. It's like reading a transcription of a marathon video festival that's been preempted by a blackout.
While the author clearly has an eye for cinematic allusions, a little reporting might have gone a long way. When he tells us that
To his credit, Austerlitz does a nice job of documenting how the cleverest video directors have boosted their credibility by paying homage to cinematic landmarks; he knows how to connect Sinead O'Connor to Maria Falconetti's silent-era Joan of Arc. And "Money for Nothing" shows just how much Hollywood has, in turn, been influenced by MTV. The husband-and-wife directorial team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who recently made their feature film debut with "Little Miss Sunshine," have joined a long list of video directors who have moved on to features, including Romanek, Spike Jonze, and Michel Gondry.
But like the garbled message of the classroom violence in Pearl Jam's controversial "Jeremy" video, plenty of questions are left unanswered. Did the music video irreparably damage the audience's traditional interpretive relationship with the pop song, force-feeding a story line or an artist's own visual associations? Critics, musicians , and fans have argued that point for years, but it's absent here. Were hit videos a financial boon for the record industry? Despite his title, the author doesn't say.
Music videos -- often mocked by their core audience and lamented by the artists they served, ultimately shunned by the network that nurtured them -- have been dismissed as a second-rate artistic endeavor from the first downbeat. Austerlitz, a self-proclaimed child of the MTV era, makes a strong case for the artistic merit of the form, however imperfect it may be. And he applauds the once-moribund video's resurgence, as video-compatible MP3 players and cell phones and the rise of video-on-demand technology on zeitgeist-y web sites such as YouTube have made it viable all over again.
But he also points out that the animated duo Beavis and Butt-head, MTV's wildly popular, monosyllabic armchair critics during the mid-1990s, "were the sharpest, pithiest, flat-out best music video critics -- ever." The author, it would seem, is content to settle for second best.
James Sullivan is the author of "Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon." 
