Book Review: "TV a Go Go: Rock on TV from 'American Bandstand' to 'American Idol'" (2005) by Jake Austen

Television and rock and roll rose to national prominence at about the same time in the 1950s, and so the two have always had a sort of symbiotic development. That history of rock and roll music on TV is traced with great detail and skill in the book "TV a Go Go: Rock on TV from 'American Bandstand' to 'American Idol'" by Jake Austen. Austen offers an exhaustive account of rock music on television in an accessible but still substantive fashion in this enlightening book.

The chapters in "TV a Go Go" follow a roughly chronological pattern--with some overlap from chapter to chapter where subject matter dictates. The first chapter is an exploration of "proto TV rock" in a period (mainly the '50s) when rock and roll was itself still prototypical. Television musical acts such as Nat King Cole and others lead into the first appearances of rock and roll acts on shows such as "The Steve Allen Show," "Stage Show," and "The Ed Sullivan Show." Highlighted, as might be expected, are the Sullivan appearances of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Austen does more than most authors with these signal performances, though, offering important context and showing how they fit into the pattern of rock acts on Sullivan and other shows of the 1950s and early-1960s.

The book proceeds with chapters on every major movement in rock music and its intersection with TV. These include: dance shows, beginning with Dick Clark's "American Bandstand" (and a perceptive assessment of Clark's place in the history of rock on TV) but also including several important local dance programs; the phenomenon of "fake bands" on TV, such as the Monkees and the Partridge Family; rock and roll cartoons, including such acts as the Archies and Alvin and the Chipmunks (as well as others of this surprisingly large contingent); a penetrating examination of black music on TV, with a history of "Soul Train" and background on several other obscure yet significant shows; the 1970s trend for live concerts on late-night TV, most famously on "Midnight Special"; an intriguing look at punk rock on TV; the birth and growth of MTV and music video; and rock and roll reality television of the 2000s, including the indomitable "American Idol."

The final chapter of "TV a Go Go" is a fascinating case study of one figure who has been central to rock on TV and for whom TV has been central: Michael Jackson. Here Austen provides a year by year chronicle of Jackson's TV appearances, performance by performance, event by event. This chronicle begins during the Jackson 5ive years of the late-1960s and early-1970s, continues through Michael's first solo appearances in the latter '70s, reaches a crescendo with the landmark performance on the Motown 25th anniversary show in 1983 and the same period's pioneering music videos, traces MJ's post-"Thriller" career in TV performances and music videos (including such incidents as the controversial "Black and White" video of 1991), and concludes with the reality-TV like saga that Jackson's life and career has become since his 1993 accusations of child molestation. Through the story of Jackson's TV appearances, Austen manages to provide a microcosm of the preceding account of the development of rock on TV.

"TV a Go Go" is a veritable encyclopedia of rock performances on TV. Austen is a dedicated aficionado of rock music and of TV and offers exhaustive analyses of particular appearances and particular moments of importance to rock TV. These discussions treat forgotten and obscure shows (such as "Kiddie a Go Go," a dance show for the grade school set, or "Inside Bed-Sty," a local show in New York City featuring black musicians), as well as the subject of rock music on non-musical shows, most interestingly punk rock on 1970s series such as "Quincy M.E." and "CHiPs." The book has a surprisingly light emphasis on music video and the development of MTV, which leaves somewhat of a hole in Austen's analysis, but this is forgivable due to the subject's relatively thorough treatment elsewhere.

"TV a Go Go" is not a scholarly book, although it will appeal to scholarly needs due to its exhaustive historical accounting of rock music on American TV. This historical work will be of interest to anyone with a deep interest in either TV history or in the history of popular music.

Film Review: "Flashdance" (1983, directed by Adrian Lyne)

By 1983, a couple of years into the MTV era, movie studio executives apparently began to wonder what would happen if the principles and forms of the music video were applied to a full-length feature film. "Flashdance" is what happened.

I could say that "Flashdance" is the story of an aspiring dancer who works as a welder by day but calling what happens in the film a story is being a bit generous. Over the course of the film there are characters, who do stuff, and talk to each other, and get into conflicts, some of them romantic in nature. The result, though, is not really a story but rather an accumulation of the kind of vague narrative vignettes that became common accoutrements to music videos: dramatizations that serve no dramatic purpose but exist simply so that there are dramatic-looking moving pictures to see while (or before, or after) the music plays. "Flashdance," as a result, does not have a very coherent plot. Indeed, much of it unfolds as if there wasn't in fact any script at all.

The film has become famous for the imagery of Jennifer Beals sweating and strutting in her dance performances. Beals, who plays the aspiring dancer, Alex, puts in a career-making performance, not because of its quality, but merely because of its notoriety. The supposed dramatic tension in the film derives from Alex's desire to be admitted to a fancy dance school, but this entire arc is introduced flaccidly and just left hanging for much of the film. Alex is surrounded by a cast of stock characters: a best friend, an aspiring ice skater who can't skate and instead becomes a stripper; a wisecracking male sidekick, a short order cook who is an aspiring, and embarassingly bad, comedian; a tall, dark and handsome love interest (her boss at her welding job, played by Michael Nouri); a loving and encouraging grandma who dies on her (an underutilized Lilia Skala).

As hackneyed as the narrative elements of the film are, the visual imagery, as might be expected of a feature-length music video, is relatively stronger. The cinematography (by Don Peterson) has an intriguingly gritty feel that does a good job of exploiting the quasi-story's Pittsburgh setting (especially as Alex bicycles all over the city). A few of the dance sequences are striking, such as Alex's opening number featuring cascading water (see picture above) and a later, new-wavy performance with a glowing TV screen, black light, and Alex in whiteface.

These visual strengths, though, combined with the film's famous music--the iconic title song by Irene Cara, Michael Sembello's "Maniac," in addition to a synthesizer-happy score by Giorgio Moroder--only serve to accentuate the film's narrative weaknesses. In the broader scheme of American cinema, "Flashdance" was nonetheless successful in marrying MTV visuals and popular music in a fashion that could inhabit a feature film and appeal to 1980s audiences. Other films would soon follow that did this kind of thing much better--"Footloose," for example--but "Flashdance," in spite of its glaring ineptitude, has the distinction of having done them first.