See hear now: Video music may replace records entirely. Just as advances in stereo technology rendered monaural record players obsolete, the silicon-chip revolution may makes stereos a thing of the past. Stereo sound for video cassette recorders and televisions is quickly be coming cheap enough for home use. Rock fans, the major consumers of sophisticated stereo systems, will be among the first to buy this hardware. Though video music is presented in various ways - broadcast, or screened in art galleries and music clubs - most of it is intended for rockers, a mass audience with purchasing punch. 

The first rock-around-the-clock cable station, Music Television (MTV) premiered on August 1, 1981, beamed via satellite into some 2.5 million U.S. homes. The event was a dream come true for MTV's programmer, 28-year-old Bob Pittman, a marketing wunderkind with a practiced smile. Pittman began as a programmer for Album-Oriented Radio (AOR), an amorphous product of the Seventies that mixes hard rock's sound (piercing guitars, ever-present drums) and pop's melodies, and is packaged to please the widest possible young audience.

Backed by two years of market re search funded by MTV's parent company, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Corporation (WASEC), Pittman modeled the style and substance of his programming on that of AOR. MTV offers nonstop video songs, interrupted only by cheerful hosts (“veejays”) presenting soft-music news, occasional live concerts, and commercial breaks (eight minutes per hour).

Musical segues are accompanied by visual effects: wipes, superimpositions, and dissolves. It's even broadcast in stereo, circumventing television's tinny mono sound via a special “stereo transmission processor” which allows cable operators (for a mere $1,400) to receive signals from WASEC's satellite and launch it onto the cable of an available local FM frequency. Viewers pay an additional nominal fee for home stereo hook-in. 

MTV's video songs are supplied free by record companies as a promotional effort, like records to radio stations. MTV has a playlist of over 500 of these promos. Most were made in the past few years, the product of fiscal crisis. After record companies realized that they could no longer afford to publicize up-and-coming groups through expensive national tours, they opted to use tapes as a marketing device. AOR's videotapes, like the music they document, are almost always studio efforts, carefully orchestrated to present groups in the best possible light. Costing about $10,000 each, they are a cheap means of advertising by industry standards. Easily shown to buyers at trade conventions and to a mass, young audience on late night network rock shows needing filler, promos were understandably an instant success.

Most promos emulate network TV's approximations of real-time performance: Groups lip-synch lyrics and play mute instruments while the camera's eye lingers on a “starring” lead singer. Yet though they often sell millions of records, most AOR groups just don't have strong visual signatures. A recent Rolling Stone article dubbed these bands “faceless” and challenged readers to identify photos of seemingly inter changeable band members.

Since MTV repeats hit songs about once every six hours, the big question is what would motivate kids to repeatedly watch footage of performers they barely recognize. Quasi-documentaries are rarely engaging after the first see, and, dependent upon formulas developed in the mid-Sixties, rather tired as a genre: video artist John Sanborn calls them "re-heated Shindig and Hullaballoo.” Even tapes featuring charismatic performers, --Mick Jagger or Stevie Nicks-pale after a few viewings. Narrative strategies are being developed to enliven reruns. Most lack the charm of the Richard Lester's Beatles promo, A Hard Day's Night (1964). Pandering to rock's biggest audience teenage males - the enacted songs focus on love, often with a misogynistic point of view. These illustrated romances usually short-circuit; three-and a-half minutes doesn't allow for much exciting visual foreplay. In fact, most tapes are tamer-and infinitely sillier than Elvis on Ed Sullivan back in 1956. The sex on MTV probably never will get really hot: Pittman runs a tightly censored ship. According to rock critic Jon Pareles, Pittman rejected The Tubes' “White Punks on Dope” be cause it pictured scantily-clad women and a pro-drug message. Has Pittman watched the network soaps lately?

The fevered spirit of teen rebellion against family, school, and state, which energized rock music from Buddy Holly to The Clash, is sorely lacking at MTV. You'll find a few promos providing social commentary masked as comedy: In Devo's “It's A Wonderful World," an off camera singer extolls the world's won while Booji Boy, the mutant space cowboy, watches scenes of an America gone mad. But most of MTV's tapes have even less punch than the insipid AOR lyrics. The studio-oriented bands who write and perform AOR hit songs have little say in their videotape productions. Most are farmed out to commercials producers, and the result is often aesthetically mismatched video and audio. A few performers, like David Byrne of the Talking Heads and Ray Davies of The Kinks, insist on making their own tapes. Byrne's “Once in A Lifetime,” made in collaboration with choreographer Toni Basil, is arguably the best promo yet made. Byrne's interpretive performance of a tongue-speaking evangelist, the song's subject, gives added dimension to the lyrics, synergistically fusing sound and image. But few performers have the clout to demand creative control over their tapes. And so the majority of MTV's promos remain entertaining commercials.

 MTV's use of free promos keeps their production costs low: At present, MTV pays only a small performance fee, about $.14 per screening, to BMI and ASCAP. MTV's surveys point to increased record sales for featured artists, and labels are likely to continue providing promos gratis. They may even use the promos as ads for their own video-music features slated for TV syndication or theatrical release. Innovative independent producer Don Letts’ feature-length documentary of The Clash, The Clash on Broadway was co-released with a promo. His strategy is sure to increase sales of both film and record, and is a harbinger of future record company practice.

There has been little complaint from affiliates—though lots from rock critics regarding the hard sell evident in MTV's promos. According to MTV, viewer response has been unexpectedly strong. WASEC's preliminary research had indicated that MTV's 12 to 34-year-old target audience rarely sat in front of a TV, seeing it merely as ambient entertainment, but more recent studies have found the kids watching the station for hours without interruption. MTV's critics argue that TV cannot successfully mimic radio: An audience may listen to a song repeatedly but won't look at a visualization of it as often, because the eye needs more stimulation than the ear. These critics ignore the large playlist of diverse groups, providing a visual and musical stimulation rare on broadcast TV. Much more could be done on MTV, simply by aping the radio stations' appetite for nostalgia. There's plenty of archive material available: a quarter-century of rock-and-roll TV shows and movies, from Bandstand to Soul Train, The Monkees to The Magical Mystery Tour, Love Me Tender to The T.A.M.I. Show. There are potential clips from rock-docs (Don't Look Back, Woodstock) and newsreel service - how about something from a mid-Sixties Rolling Stones press conference? The “specials” need to be more special, rather than settling for the low production values of an REO Speedwagon concert. Alas, it is reported that Pittman has already considered these progressive ideas and rejected them. He wants it quick, slick, and samey-bland on the run.

Unlike MTV's main competitor Night Flight, a music-oriented late-night programming service carried on USA Net work, MTV screens almost no black music, only the occasional new wave group, and no experimental tapes at all. (Sadly, Night Flight's innovative content is often trapped in a corny, formulaic production style.) At present there are no plans to include these types of music on MTV. WASEC does plan other music stations,  however, including channels devoted to black and country music. Cable's much-vaunted narrowcasting may lead to a profitable form of segregation. 

MTV is slated for a broad spectrum of American rock fans. Real innovation almost never work on such a wide scale: the leveling effects of popularization go hand in hand with conservatism, a loss of aesthetic highs and lows. MTV's video music is no different. The most intriguing video music is presented to a relatively small audience in closed-circuit situations, like rock clubs. 

Rock clubs cater to the urban segment of MTV's audience: young adults with a passion for music, like 22-year-old Charlie Libin, a chain-smoking film maker whose choir-boy looks belie his city savvy. When Libin placed video monitors over the dance floor at Hurrah Discotheque in 1980, he heralded a new era of club entertainment and made the club one of the most popular in New York City. Danceteria followed with a TV environment: the Video Lounge, programmed by Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong, former filmmakers who named their company Advanced TV. Soon the sight of a new wave audience honing into the eerie glow of TVs be came all too familiar. A bewildering array of video equipment also became a standard club feature: viewers could watch tapes on TV set, or six-foot Advent projected video screen, or even six teen-foot Eidophor screen-state of-the-art equipment which costs a stately half-million. 

The fad spread beyond New York when club owners across the country became aware of video music's assets. As former veejay Maureen Nappi points out, "video anesthetizes": Club operators are willing to invest in expensive video equipment because it keeps restless patrons occupied as they await the live sets that begin around 1 A.M. The bar is open, and its cash register ringing, at all times.

Most of the tapes shown by veejays at clubs are promos, but of iconoclastic performers: The Tom-Tom Club, Laurie Anderson, The Psychedelic Furs. Linking tapes together like disco hits, one tape segueing seamlessly into the next, veejays combine the skills of a disco deejay and a manic new-age TV pro grammer. Their blithe “borrowings” of off-air footage, old movies, and experimental tapes enrich their programming, taking the edge off the promos' commercialism. (Ivers and Amstrong also feature their mildly erotic “Girls Porn: Boys Backs,” a welcome addition to the male-dominated world of rock clubs.) Many veejays also make impromptu tapes, spinning records and playing pre recorded visuals against them. The effect can be mesmerizing-an Eighties equivalent of the Joshua Light Show, whose psychedelic visuals presented at Manhattan's Fillmore East in the late Sixties. Club video's disco-like format will probably last as long as the Light Show: When last heard from, Joshua a was a veejay. The clubs' current excitement is captured and preserved in documentations of live performances shot by club veejays doubling as tape producers. The economy of technical means (frequently only one camera is used) and the performers' own post-punk, pre-Vegas theatrics make for an engaging form of video vérité. Pat Ivers' work with various new wave bands has been anthologized in a series of tapes called Nightclubbing. She declares that these tapes are best seen as “propaganda," a way of seeing obscure bands, Ivers and her partner, Emily Armstrong, are very careful about who handles their tapes after losing many of their masters during the police raid which closed down Danceteria in 1980. Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician, who took over at Hurrah when Libin left to work on independent productions, are not so wary. They have package a sixty-minute tape for sale to the home market. Called, Live at Hurrah, this $60 video record features fifteen New Wave groups including the Raybeats, the Bush Tetras, and Defunkt.

Many producers, like Maureen Nappi, are no longer interested in making documentaries. Nappi wants to be part of the band, her instrument a camera with music controlling the video signal. With the growing interest of bands in elaborate stage performances, these ambitions may be realized. Video in clubs will move from the sidelines onto the stage, becoming an integral part of the performances themselves. It's un likely that audiences will ever devote their full attention to video; there are too many distractions—drinking, drugs and live bands. Artists who have shown their tapes in clubs complain of people talking during the tapes. Most were paid in bar tickets, although clubs made money from drinks sold during the performances. 

For the art of video, the Kitchen Center for Video Music and Performance in New York's SoHo, is the only major avant-garde showcase to include shows devoted to video music-snubbed by most art centers because of its commercial associations. The Kitchen premieres videotapes in its loft, on monitors placed at odd angles and different heights. The audience sits on uncomfortable wooden folding chairs which dissociates this viewing experience from watching TV at home. Tom Bowes, the Kitchen's wild-haired video curator, operates a control board in the back of the room.

A putative descendent of Major Bowes, host of radio and TV's Amateur Hour, Bowes features the best selection of video music around. There are no rigid formats here, no MTV playlists, none of the sense of tokenism entertainment that one gets in clubs. The feeling of community among the artists, the Kitchen staff, and the audience is linked to more hippy rock concerts in the Sixties than to today's cool music scene. 

The Kitchen's support of video music is an extension of its famed support of experimental musicians like Phil Glass, Steve Reich, Rhys Chatman, Glenn Branca, and George Lewis. Light years away from industry product, the Kitchen's video documents offer a glimpse of music available almost no- where else, like the rap songs of the Funky Four Plus One. Preserved in a tape featuring Bowes' lyrical camera- work, the group's simple lyrics and presentation expose myths of city life. But rap groups and most of the other bands who play at the Kitchen are too avant-garde ever to gain wide acceptance. Since major record companies rarely support unmarketable groups, and smaller labels cannot afford to make tapes, the Kitchen's documentations serve as art-world promos. Hour-long compilation tapes of music performance are packaged for distribution by Bowes and Greg Miller, the Kitchen's director of distribution. Most popular in Europe, they have also been show at galleries across the U.S. New Yorkers can see these tapes on request in the Kitchen's video viewing room, a small space featuring daily screenings. 

The Kitchen's gallery is the site for video installations, like performance art, a product of Seventies dissatisfaction with traditional art categories--multi media gesamtkunstwerks, neo-Wagnerian conflations which have never achieved the popularity or convenience of performance art. Video environments are rare. In Rob Wynne's recent examination of topology, a sound resembling an Arctic breeze accompanies this dizzying array of videotapes, films, and blue print-like drawings of spinning marbles. Brian Eno's One Fifth Avenue provides an admirable model for future installations. Echoing his perceptive statement, “the slower and more static an image is, in fact, the more like a painting, the more one could watch it,” the work features music and imagery composed on the same principle: simple phrasing that varies slightly in color and composition over a long period of time. 

Expensive projects like installations will become a thing of the past if the Kitchen doesn't get more money; federal cuts in arts funding have forced it to seek earned income. To test the possibility of lucrative broadcast distribution, a forty-minute tape of video music had been packaged. This thought-provok ing compilation features only one promo -Byrne's—and two documentaries. The main body of the tape is devoted to formal experiments like Static, John Sanborn and Kit Fitzgerald's study of sound-image analogues—what they call "visual humming”—and Frankie Teardrop, Paul Dougherty's accomplished visualization of Alan Suicide's song: only ominous sounds accompany these images of death and emptiness. The Kitchen is also acting as producer for a few feature-length video projects, including the first avant-garde opera made for television, Robert Ashley's Perfect Parts. This big-budget enterprise combines the hypnotic rhythms of Ashley's score with John Sanborn's cocky control of editing technique. 

The Kitchen hopes to sell these tapes to cable. So far there have been many requests but no buyers. Cable programmers have good reason to be cautious: it's doubtful that these tapes will ever have wide audience appeal, even on the arts programming stations. Young rock fans form the base of video music's audience. The Kitchen's tapes are just too idiosyncratic, too difficult for most rock consumers. Rockers look to video music for easy entertainment, not for aesthetic challenge. Like AOR radio, most televised video music will feature “faceless bands.” Innovative video music, like that shown at the Kitchen, will rarely be broadcast. The realities of the market place once again strike a sour note for art idealists.