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Every day on cable television's MTV, children as young as 5 regularly watch
women in chains and people being tortured and shot.
Rock 'n' roll has always been a counterculture art form, emphasizing sex and
rebellion against authority. Recently, what had been merely suggestive has turned
cruel and vicious, and, possibly, dangerous.
"Teenagers have not fused the idea of love and sex," says psychologist and nationally
syndicated columnist Dr. Joyce Brothers, "so when you teach them that
violence and sex are related, it's extremely dangerous for their future behavior."
That the music industry sees sex and violence as a marketable commodity is
evidenced by a recent press release sent to pop music writers by Elektra-Asylum
Records. The promotional material described the latest album from Mötley Crüe as
"dripping with impure and adulterated lust. . ."
The release began by quoting the group's bass player, Nikki Sixx: "We're the
American youth. And youth is about sex, drugs, pizza, and more sex. We're intellectuals
on a crotch level."
The executives at Elektra-Asylum, a division of Warner Communications, refused
to comment on why the company would publicize the group in this manner.
Mötley Crüe is by no means an exception. At Idol's Passaic performance, the
28-year-old British rocker wore tight, black leather pants, a sleeveless black and red
shirt that looked as if it had gone through a paper shredder, a studded black leather
gauntlet and an Iron Cross.
When his fist wasn't raised in the air, it was groping his crotch. At one point, he
writhed on the floor, a microphone shoved down the front of his pants, while two
These kinds of performances are no longer restricted to concert halls and theaters.
They are now being piped into homes daily.
"Because of the seductiveness of the tube, in the same way that I view 'Sesame
Street' to be seductive in a positive way, I view some of the music videos in a negative
way," says disc jockey Pete Fornatale, a 15-year veteran at New York rock
radio station WNEW-FM. "One is teaching them their ABCs and 1, 2, 3s and the
other is teaching them to bring knives to concerts and to defile as many women as
they can in the shortest time possible."
MTV, the 24-hour rock music channel, has come under heavy fire by such groups
as Women Against Pornography and the National Coalition on Television Violence.
In a recent report, the NCTV said more than half the videos on MTV feature
violence, or strongly suggest violence.
Among the videos cited by the NCTV are Michael Jackson's "Thriller" ("features
a very appealing young hero having fun terrorizing his girlfriend with horror
violence'), the Rolling Stones' "Undercover of the Night" ("features intense automatic
weapons violence . . . including a violent lawless execution") and Idol's "Dancing
With Myself' ("filmed by the producer of 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,' has a
naked woman struggling in chains behind a translucent sheet").
Says Dr. Thomas Radecki, NCTV chairman and a psychiatrist on the staff of the
University of Illinois School of Medicine: "The message is that violence is normal
and OK, that hostile sexual relations between men and women are common and
acceptable, that heroes actively engage in torture and murder of others for fun."
In response, the management of MTV has issued the following statement: "MTV
is not pro-violent and we're not advocating violence. And at this point in time, it's
not an issue we're willing to debate in the press."
In fairness to the cable channel, its management has rejected videos because of
violence and nudity (a scene from the Stones "She Was Hot" was deemed as going
"beyond the bounds of good taste," although an edited version is now airing), and
MTV has pulled other videos after a public outcry (Van Halen's "(Oh) Pretty
Woman," which featured, among other things, bondage and fondling).
Evelina Kane, a member of Women Against Pornography, says the most disturbing
aspect of rock videos is the amount of violence directed toward women. "The
message of most videos is about sex and sex roles and the perpetuation of the myth
of men as active and women as passive," Kane says. "With the prominence of
scanty costumes and the dominance of men, what's being reintroduced is the idea of
women as either good girls or whores."
Idol, according to his publicist, Ellen Golden, says critics of his videos are "missing
their points'. He says the theme of "Dancing With Myself" is the struggle for
freedom and the chained woman represents Oktobriana, a symbol of the struggle for
liberation in the Russian Revolution. (On his left arm, Idol sports a tattoo of
Oktobriana.) And in "White Wedding," when he jams a wedding band on his bride's
finger, drawing blood in the process, Idol says, he is illustrating men's cruelty to
women.
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