Some People Will Do Anything To Sell Singles

 

More thoughts on MTV@40, specifically Duran Duran's then "controversial" Girls on Film video.

Kevin Godley of 10cc fame directed the video. “The original idea, I guess, was an ironic take on exploitation, because that's what the song was about,...We were trying to stay true, in our own way, to what the song was about and be ironic about it. But particularly in America, irony isn't a hugely popular thing, so maybe it just went over people's heads and all they saw was naked women. I think it was originally conceived to be a little bit more intelligent than it is.” 

Godley was trying to be ironic but it didn't work at the time, and in some ways still doesn't work with the general public in America. But the curious thing is is that the entire world started to be sarcastic and ironic (or "meta") eventually--right around the time of the advent of the internet. There's something about the internet as a medium as an engine of irony, partly because it can be done anonymously. The irony about the irony is that even to this day, people find it hard to understand irony, or to know when it's being used as an artistic device. Either they take it the wrong way, or they don't understand it at all which can breed contempt in some cases. But pop culture by nature cuts things down a few notches, and people tend to follow the shifting baselines.

It's also interesting that Generation X was also entering their teen years at the time, and MTV music videos were like what 45s were for Boomers in the early 1960s. This holds true for every generation and the technologies that they use in their teen years. Now it's Tik-Tok and video shorts which are the 45s of the 2020s. Around 2030 there will be another generation that will be using another technology as their 45. Radio play sold singles in the 60s and 70s, MTV sold them in the 80s and 90s, websites and social media sold them beginning in the aughts, and the Metaverse is poised to sell them in the future.