If you define it simply as "consumer choice," it's the plenitude that you can select from that could or could not be a great. That'd be an interesting discussion, but I don't think that's really the dominant thing that's taking place with children having a range of choice. It's the nature of the choice, and how the choices are laid out there, that is really the most striking feature of it. I think there that the issue isn't really the amount of choice; it's the amount of sort of commercialism that permeates all the choices. So, on one hand, while it seems like you have a massive range of choice, they're really underneath it girded by the same commercial logic. There's very little diversity in a certain way. It's the appearance of diversity, but without it.

What's that commercial logic?

The commercial logic is the idea that everything is dedicated to the idea of selling something. The whole point of the relationship with the teen is to turn them upside-down and shake all the money out of their pockets. That's the sole purpose of it--the artistic, the creative. There's traditionally been a distinction between the editorial or creative side and the commercial side. It was a common theme in our media for much of the twentieth century.

It has always been a nebulous relationship. Commercial factors have invariably weighed in and influenced the creative and editorial side. But that relationship has really collapsed in the past ten years. The barrier between them, the notion that there should be an integrity . . . to the creative product or to the editorial product--distinct from the needs of commercial interests to make as much money as possible to just stand on its own--is corroded. It has come under sustained pressure, because the people who actually make the decisions are commercial people. And those values ultimately are permeating the creative side. This affects children's and teens' cultures, as much as all other cultures, maybe even more so, due to the importance of that market to marketers for a lifetime of consumption.

The marketers we've talked to seem to feel that there's almost an ethic in the fact that they do focus groups and consumer testing and they find out what these kids really want. So in a sense . . . the teens' power is on the rise.

It's quite the opposite, actually. The purpose of the focus group is never to find out what teens want per se. It's to find out what teens want so they can make the most money off it as possible. What they're looking for is simply within the range of what they can make the most money off of. It's not a legitimate search for anything that teens might possibly want. It's not an open-ended hunt. If they were to find out that most teens aren't interested in something, but still this company can make money off selling it to them, they're still going to sell it to them. It's a self-serving argument to say that this research is done to basically serve teens. It's done to better manipulate teens.

What is left out of a consumer research project with teens that doesn't fall into the category of something to make money on?

. . . What if the focus groups asked, "Do you really want your musicians connected to products?" In teens, if they found out, "No. We don't really want the musicians whose music we listen to connected to underpants and deodorant and buttons and wear." The response to that would not be, "Okay. We won't do that." The response would be, "Well, how can we do that without pissing them off?" That's how you would take that focus group information if you were a marketer. How can you still make money off that but not antagonize them? And if it's a legitimate focus group, they say, "Okay. That's a legitimate concern. They want their musicians to just do music." But that's not something they can do, because there's no money in that.

Do you see other values being sucked out of teen culture as a result?

Absolutely. The whole name of integrity . . . sounds corny or banal, because we live in cynical times. The whole notion that there's some reason to do something outside of just making money off it is lost in a culture in which the sole point is to make money off you. You're told that's the whole reason for this being in existence. In popular music, there's a huge difference if you ultimately think the reason you're listening to this music is because these musicians basically were hired because of some marketing thing--and it's all a scam just to make money--rather than these are musicians who are artists and having something to say to you, it's a relationship with you, they really believe in something. . . .I don't know if we'll really know the effects, ultimately, for a while. So I'm speculating. But I can't see anything good about it. Nothing good that comes out of it, only bad.

. . . Has this all . . . negatively affected the entertainment companies?

No, no. In fact, I think they're in the midst of it. In fact, it's maybe very much the opposite. The entertainment companies are a handful of massive conglomerates that own four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States. Those same companies also own all the film studios, all the major TV networks, and pretty much all the TV stations in the ten largest markets. They own all or part of every single commercial cable channel. They look at the teen market as part of this massive empire that they're colonizing.

You should look at it like the British or the French empires in the nineteenth century. Teens are like Africa. There's this range that they're going to take over, and their weaponry is films, music, books, CDs, internet access, clothing, amusement parks, sports teams. That's all this weaponry they have to make money off of this market, to colonize this market. And that's exactly how they approach it. So they look at music as just one small part of it. They aren't music companies; they're moneymaking companies, and music is a weapon that generates money for them.

Can you describe the way the copycat syndrome works?

The music industry's probably the most interesting one to study culturally, for a number of reasons. But the primary reason, in an economic sense, is that music is the least capital-intensive of all our modern commercial media. To make a good movie, even a low-budget one, costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not the low millions. But if you have a pretty expensive tape recorder and equipment, instruments, you can make great music in a garage. Music is fairly inexpensive. So music's always had a very interesting relationship between the companies--the musicians and the users. Because the costs are so low, anyone can really do it.

Commercial music has had a very contradictory relationship with artists in the last 50 years, say, since the rise of the electric guitar and the rise of popular music in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the modern notion of popular music with the small combos. And what we see is that people who are students of music, or even fans, would say that the great trends in music have invariably come outside of sort of the commercial networks. They've come from ghettos or barrios. They've come from college towns, but they're people who play music because they love it and it means something in their lives.

And if you go through the history of popular music since the post-war years--starting with rock 'n roll, which grew out of rhythm and blues, going on to soul, to 1960s rock, to the punk movement, reggae, hip-hop--none of them started in the research and development department of EMI Records. All of them started in a barrio or in Kingston, Jamaica, or in the South Bronx.

And then it's a very interesting process in which they're sort of appropriated, or, to use an academic term, "colonized"--I think "colonized" is a better term, in which they're taken in and then they try to figure out the way to make the most money out of it, if you're the company. "Yes, boy, this hip-hop is really good. What can we do with it?" "Well, we'll have Colonel Sanders do hip-hop in a commercial," or something like that. Or "We'll have Rod Stewart add some hip-hop licks to his next CD." And then you say, "Well, now we need someone who can do more of this hip-hop stuff. Let's find some people that fit that demographic model who look like they'd be really right-on hip-hop artists." It's the same thing for punk or grunge.

And in the process, the sort of commercial value is putting the cart in front of the horse. The commercial values start determining the content, rather than the content bringing the commercialism behind it to sort of pay the bills and sell the product. And it loses . . . authenticity. It loses its connection to the audience. Its creativity becomes a joke, ultimately. It becomes farce.

Our schlocky culture has been filled with sort of these artists that we make fun of, and they're almost humorous in a way, but ultimately they're tragic. And I think the real irony of our commercial media system is that it can't really help this in music. They do what's rational. They're trying to locate the thing, the real thing, the next real thing. But soon as they find it, they almost snuff it out, because they put the commercial logic on top of it, which wipes it out.

What's happened in popular music in the last 25 years is that window of opportunity for new musical art forms to develop and have some integrity before they get grabbed by the big companies has been narrowed, because these companies are searching out anything. They want to be the first one in to get the band that's going to be the next big hit, the next grunge, the next hip-hop. So there's not that incubation period anymore. Now they hear about some guy in the South Bronx who's doing something different, and man, they're up there in the next cab. Two days later, the guy's got a contract.

Before, reggae or hip-hop or punk had years to develop before they became big commercial entities. You really had a whole body of work by a number of great artists that was out there. Or the British invasion in rock 'n roll in the early 1960s. Well, those days are over. So you have the ironic thing, that the effort to get more of this music out kills it off. It leaves us in the. . . current popular situation--the sort of hyper-commercialized sewer.

I saw a rapper perform and he got up there and said, "Thanks to Sprite for getting the message out." And these guys were as authentic as there are around today. How is it that they're deluded about the positive force of Sprite pushing their message out?

It's not a matter of one particular artist being deluded, going into individual psychology. It's looking ultimately at the whole creative and artistic process. When you're having Sprite sponsor your tours or pay for your recording sessions and you're wearing Sprite logos on your stuff, then it's just a short step to the next thing in line. Once you sort of cross that bridge, you say, "We're for sale." Now, you might do it for good reasons. A lot of artists probably say, "Look, this'll help us do more concerts or maybe make our tickets cheaper, because this is helping us out." It's not that they're actually bad people. Some of them are just greedy. "Let's let them make more money for us and we don't care." Some of them might be very well intended.

But the ultimate logic here, the trajectory, is right out of what makes the music great in the first place. And I think that's why there's a great tension now in the musical community. A lot of artists are just really concerned about this. Very famous artists like the Springsteens and the Pearl Jams and a lot of artists aren't famous to some extent, because they won't play this game, because they simply refuse to commercialize their music--commercialize what they try to present to their audience and their relationship to their audience.

Do you think this phenomenon is lowering teen taste?

That's a highly speculative thing. I don't know. I don't know how you can say that. I think if great music comes on, people are going to respond to it. I don't know. I don't know that you're dumbing down teens so they no longer appreciate a good tune. That's a pretty flexible concept. Teen tastes were dumbed down in the early 1960s in rock 'n roll, listening to that garbage that was passed out from 1959 or 1960 to 1963. They sure got upgraded really fast in 1964. I'm not concerned about that. I think if great music comes on, people will respond.

The period that you're talking about is the golden rock '-n roll age between, say, 1940 and 1972.

No. Even 1990. You go right through to grunge even, into the 1990s.

Before that, great music came from the academy, and after that, I guess great music comes from the corporation. Isn't this just an ascendancy of a new set of filters for what we get?

Perhaps, but I don't think great music came from elites prior to World War II. If you study a history of popular music, we have extraordinarily rich creations of folk music in almost every country, especially in the Anglo-Irish tradition that played such a large role here and really influenced all our popular music in the South. What makes American music so exciting is this fusion of African and Anglo-Irish traditions here in Appalachia and in the South that fuels our country music, that fuels our rock 'n roll and popular music and the whole jazz tradition. These traditions were not elite traditions at all, and they've existed for hundreds of years. Especially before the Second World War, they were huge in the country.

So in my view, a better way to look at it would be to say we've had these great popular traditions that didn't start in 1945. That was just a new phase of them, because there is a fundamental change that we're in the midst of. It's not like there was a firm break. This commercial pressure has always been there, but it's sort of a quantitative change, as the mathematical law goes, and in a certain way, it seem to be a qualitative change. The influence of marketing and commercial pressures at some point becomes so great that the pond becomes the lake. You really shift the relationship.

Commercial value is now permeated such that you have major artists like Britney Spears and 'N Sync, who are basically marketing creations. They're basically, "This is what kids want. We're going to locate the demographics, write the music, use a computer to write the music. Just plug in a few chords." It's quite different from some people playing in their garage who love music and do it for years and have something to say to an audience of people they live with and relate to.

We talked to these people who did research with kids in actual bedrooms. . . .There's this feedback loop where the audience seems to sort of suck in everything that's put before them.

I know. And I think we're in a really interesting phase, culturally. The notion that there's something distinct from commercial culture comes into question when everything's commercialized. There's the traditional notion that there was this musical thing that could start outside of commercial values. And it's a troubling notion--the idea that our references are so commercialized now that all our dissidents, all our autonomous voices, are getting their cues from MTV on how to revolt.

I think that's a real tension that's going on among young people today. For really the first time, in a decade or two, from my experience, we've seen young people, not just college students, having a real concern that their entire culture is this commercial laboratory and that being cool is buying the commercially sanctioned cool clothes. It's a real tension that's going on right now. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays itself out, because I think there's a sense that the sort of MTV-VH1 infomercial view of life--where everything is part of the sales process and being cool is something you buy and an act you sort of pose in-- ultimately that's not a very satisfying or nourishing way to live or to look at the world. And trying to create an alternative is imperative for a lot of young people. But it's very hard to do when all the markers around you are commercial.

Are teenagers willing to make their life choices from the offerings that are before them?

It's hard to generalize, obviously. It's a lot of human beings, and it comes from a wide variety of backgrounds in the United States. But I think that what I am seeing that's noticeable is that today there's more dissidence among young people. It's more vocal, more clear, than it was five, ten, fifteen years ago, certainly in a long time. I'm 47, and it's certainly since my generation came up that it's the most noticeable.

I'm a college professor. I've been seeing students pretty regularly for 17 years, and I don't want to make it sound like we're in the midst of some enormous revolution. But you can see sort of below the surface, slightly below the radar of the media, some bubbling going on that wasn't there five or ten years ago. A lot of it is the sort of political activism among young people that is absolutely unprecedented for 20 or 25 years--these demonstrations in Seattle last year, the demonstrations in Washington at the conventions, the Nader campaign-- in which literally you had hundreds of thousands of people, 18 to 25, doing stuff that I haven't seen that generation do since the 1970s.

Do you see some artists that are subconsciously making art about the very phenomenon?

I'm sure there are, and this is where my age is preventing me from giving a good answer to that question. That would be a natural expectation. I think that's been going on for a while, and that goes back to Andy Warhol, even before that. The use of commercial culture to critique and understand commercial culture, to both praise it and critique it, but to understand its significance in our life and to use those tools as a means, as artistic weaponry, so to speak. Yes, if you're an artist, I think it's almost unavoidable to do that, in a way. As I said, you're so surrounded by these marketers, to even to criticize it you have to use those tools.

Is there some optimistic hope in that these kids might push through it?

Yes. I'm very optimistic in that way, but I do think it's closely related to politics ultimately, in the broadest sense of the term. I don't think culture on that level operates independent of politics. In fact, I think one of the reasons why the music has been so lame recently in the United States hasn't had anything to do with the music industry or commercialism. It's been a response to the broader demoralization of public life, of civic life, of social life. I think music gets better and culture gets better when people engage socially and politically. The two go hand in hand. So I think if there's a broadening of interest in social and political issues among people, the music, even within the crummy commercial system, will get better, if you understand the relationship. There are other factors besides just EMI's research and marketing department that influence the nature of music.

When those factors are systematically removed by corporations, do you find that music and the sentiment around it coarsens?

You mean when it's more commercialized? I'm not a great culture theorist. I'm not even a bad cultural theorist. I'm not really a cultural theorist. So I'd be careful to give the answer to this, but my hunch--as sort of a political economist assessing these industries--if, in fact, the political critique of music is zapped out, the people want controversy in their lives. They want that sense of struggle and conflict. Then you replace it with sort of the Howard Stern-Eminem stuff, a lot of misogyny, a lot of violence, which gives the illusion of conflict and tension and excitement without the real thing. It's just picking on the weakest members of society. That seems very controversial, and it's commercially viable, but it's not the real thing.

We saw Insane Clown Posse. There were a lot of just random white young enraged men. The band felt they were really answering a cultural call and that kids who were there felt they really belonged to something.

Yes. I've heard of Limp Bizkit--nothing very favorable about them. But yes, I think there's a real need people have that's trying to be met, and the market meets it by giving them a sort of white rage, teen rage groups. But the content is just a marketing ploy for an intensive purpose that plays on the sorts of biases to pick on the weakest members, and to stay away from those powerful members of society. So it's a very unthreatening type of resistance. It's easy to pick on gay people and minorities and women. That's not going to . . . you aren't going to have to worry about it.

If you go out and start picking on the WTO and the people that own the country, now that's another matter. And that sort of stuff, that type of critique isn't there. But people want tension. People understand there's something going on in the world--it's not just a "Brady Bunch" world we live in. But they're getting Eminem and this sort of stuff. That's the corporate response. That's what they can hand out.

The white rage bands we've talked to so far . . . It seems like they're victimized as much by the corporate process as their audiences are, and they're unconsciously perpetuating the corporate cycle.

That wouldn't make sense to me. I would think that a lot of them are very earnest. The musicians, as a rule, tend to be quite earnest, and actually, most artists are. It'd be very hard to do any sort of art if you weren't earnest. Now, some people can pull it off, but most can't.

Talk about your take on MTV.

To understand MTV, you've got to first look at the parent corporation, which is called Viacom. And Viacom is an extraordinary company. It not only owns MTV, it owns VH1, it owns Black Entertainment Television, it owns CBS, it owns Paramount Pictures, it owns Showtime, it owns Simon & Schuster Book Publishers, it owns Blockbuster video rental, and it also owns about 160 radio stations, all of which are in the largest 12 markets in the country. And it's a commercial powerhouse. More than any other media company, its revenues depend upon ad sales from radio and television and cable. It's the ad-linked one. It's the most commercialized of our media companies.

All of the media companies are commercial, but the other ones tend to have a higher percentage of money that comes from amusement parks, film sales, books--things that don't rely directly on advertising. Viacom is directly an advertising-related company. They've taken American radio and almost single-handed turned it into a 24-hour infomercial on every station. And that's their genius. The head of Viacom and Sumner Redstone are all about maximizing commercial return. They make that quite clear. And if you look at MTV in that context, you get a sense of what they're all about.

We talk about how there's been a separation between creative and commercials eroding in this conglomerate culture. Well, Viacom is the lead army. They're the Napoleons of the war on that separation. They lead the fight in turning every nanosecond of time on their stations into something that's selling something. And so you look at MTV or VH1, this sister channel or brother channel, and it's really a 24-hour infomercial. Every second on the air is selling something. It's either directly selling a product, or it's going to be a program hyping a new movie that's paid for by the studio. It's really an infomercial for the studio. Or it's going to be a video, which is an infomercial for a record label. And everything that's worn on the set, the clothes that are worn by the people there, is consciously planned to sell some product somewhere. So it's really taken this whole process to the very limit.

They're quite candid about this. If you don't talk to the PR people, but you talk to their ad department call them up and disguise your voice saying, "I'm thinking of buying an ad on MTV, but I'm concerned it's not commercial enough." And they'll tell you how commercial it is, what a tremendous thing it is.

If you look around the world, it's a global phenomenon. And bluntly, it's all about commercializing the whole teen experience, making youth culture a commercial entity that's packaged and sold to people. So by watching MTV and buying the products there, looking like the people there, buying the music there, you become cool. It's a commercial relationship to coolness, of being acceptable. And if you don't do it, you're a loser.

And yet they make this great point of being all about kids.

That's the genius of it. Absolutely. It's a genius marketing procedure that works. And, as you've pointed out, it's a self-referential, almost circular thing, where that both sides interact. It's all about commercialism. That's the whole point of it. . . . If there was truth in advertising, you would have Sumner Redstone and the Viacom head be the VJs, these 60-year-old fat guys in suits, who are just counting the money--the guys who own the company and run it. Or they should make Sumner Redstone play a song on the guitar once every hour, the guy who's the owner of Viacom. Because they're the people who run it. That's what the station's all about. This station is really ultimately there to serve Sumner Redstone and the owners of that company. It has nothing to do with kids. They couldn't care less about teenagers. Teenagers are just people to turn upside-down and shake the money out of their pants and then you let go.

But the kids buy it.

Yes. You're absolutely right. And it's a tension . . . there are some dissidents within it, but you're absolutely right. It's a marketing genius. There's no question about it, but it's marketing genius. That's the only type of genius it is. There's nothing else to it, but it is pure marketing genius.

Why do they make more money off that than they would off of good stuff?

Well, it's cheaper to produce, on the one hand. One of the genius moves of Sumner Redstone and Viacom also, in additional to commercializing everything, is they slash costs. They're really famous for going into the entertainment industry and reducing the cost dramatically from what the traditional pattern has been for primetime television shows or for movies. They've kept the cost really low. And when you're hyper-commercializing everything, you can get your cost low. If you're making deals with kid clothes manufacturers to let them help you outfit the people and they're going to pay you for it, that gets the cost low. When you're basically just running music videos, which are paid for by the music companies, that keeps your cost really low.

So it's all about keeping the cost as low as possible, commercializing it in much as possible, and using market research to sort of make it look as cool as possible. And it has worked.

Now it's the A&R guy who's trying to come in and find the next Nirvana or Pearl Jam. They go in to college campuses in college towns, in Chapel Hill or Madison or Urbana-Champaign or whatever it might be in the country. They want to find the kids who are sort of smoking a lot of weed and playing music and hope they stumble across someone who's going to sell 25 million records. And you can build a whole sort of cult thing around them in the community like they had in Seattle in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Once again, it's the logic of whatever it takes to find someone you can sell and package.

Back to MTV--"Total Request Live" looks like something, but is it actually something else?

...A very interesting phenomenon has taken place that's really shown the change in our culture. In the 1950s, when rock 'n roll was the king and popular and was really taking off and selling singles was crucial, the biggest scandal that took place in American radio was called "payola." Record companies would come in and pay disk jockeys to play the records for their artists, records that wouldn't be played otherwise if a disk jockey just used their own judgment.

And this is considered a huge scandal, because they thought the American people, if you listen to a radio station, you had the right to believe that if it wasn't an ad, that the music was only being played because someone actually thought it was good music. It was an editorial call. And the disk jockeys who were convicted of payola lost their jobs, and some went to prison. It was a massive scandal in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Well, now payola's legal again. It's okay to do payola, but now the money doesn't go to a disk jockey, who's a powerless figure. The money goes to the company that owns it. So if you're a label and you pay enough money to CBS or Viacom to get your music on their stations, you could actually buy your way on. . . . So that integrity . . . is lost. You can't really believe the music you're listening to is there because some of it actually is good music. It might only be there because someone bought a bunch of ads on that station and, therefore, earned the right to get their music played on that station.

Well, of course, that influences all of us. If you hear that music over and over, there's a much greater chance you're going to like it and buy it than if you never hear it at all. And that filter, that editorial judgment, the idea that there's someone listening to the music who really knows music and cares about it is making a decision this is something that the audience might like--it's been corrupted. It's been turned over to the marketing office, and that's means whoever pays the most money can buy the attention of our audience.

And MTV is very much the same way. It is by no means a level playing field that anyone can get on the air just because they have great music. There's a whole politics there in being connected to a large label. Having all sorts of marketing muscle behind you has everything to about whether that music gets heard. So then once you're heard and you're exposed to millions of people, of course, it's going to have an influence. That's the whole premise of advertising. If it didn't have some influence, it wouldn't exist.

First of all, you had two relationships. The artists had a longer relationship to marketers, and a more direct relationship to their audience, on the one hand. But then intermediaries, the radio stations, also theoretically had this some integrity to them, so you can trust what they were doing, so they weren't simply going to play records that people paid them to play. So there were sort of these buffers in there.

Both of those buffers have been diminished to the point now where it's really like, if you have enough money, you can force your sound, force people listen to it. You can't force them to buy it. If the music's really bad, it's not a slam-dunk, but your odds of success are tremendously greater if you get millions of people to listen to your music than if you can't get them to listen to it. It's impossible to make a hit out of something that no one can ever heard.

It looks that with the internet, with Napster and all these other devices, that those voices can get heard.

Yes. What's happened with the internet in that regard is really exciting and it's very promising, but it's also still quite problematic. How that's going to play out is unclear at this point, and I wouldn't romanticize the fact that it's going to sort of upturn the system entirely. The recent deal where Napster, for example, is linking now to create a pay service, I think is one of a long list of developments which suggests that we'll see just how effective the internet technology is at overcoming the hyper-commercialization of music and culture. I tend to be skeptical, but I think, once again, we really do have to wait on this one.

Have programming and advertising become the same thing now?

Well, not the exact same thing. But on MTV, it's all a commercial. You start from the premise that is saying that everything on MTV is a commercial. It is an infomercial. That's all that MTV is. Sometimes it's an explicit advertisement paid for by a company to sell a product. Sometimes it's going to be a video for a music company there to sell music. Sometimes it's going to be the set that's filled with trendy clothes and stuff there to sell a look that will include products on that set. Sometimes it will be a show about an upcoming movie paid for by the studio, though you don't know it, to hype a movie that's coming out from Hollywood. Everything's an infomercial. There is no non-commercial turn of MTV. That's simply a nonexistent segment of the MTV product.

It seems that, as it becomes more that way, the MTV editorial and creative process is about moving in on these emotional triggers. Have you seen that phenomenon?

I don't watch MTV as much as I used to, partially due to my age, but also because they stopped putting music at some point, and I wasn't interested in the programming except for the music. So I'm not an expert on their content. But what MTV is struggling with is what's going on with all our cultural industries. We have fewer and fewer owners, but more and more choices. So they have to desperately find ways to keep people looking for gimmicks, and they don't have a huge time frame to establish an identity. With the remote control, your shelf-life of chances to keep someone, to get them to stay there, is very short. You can't develop a character every six weeks. They're going to be gone after two minutes.

It put pressure on commercial culture providers like MTV to try to find sort of things that their research shows will click right away, recognizable things, and play on those. So when you're flipping the dial and you get there and after ten seconds. you've got one of those or something that hits you so you stay, or after 30 seconds, they know you aren't going to stay there four hours waiting for something. You've got 50 other choices on the dial or you go over to the internet.

And the irony is that, with all this choice, so to speak, in our commercial media system, with all these new options which theoretically increases the quality because there'll be all these smaller markets that can be tended to, in some ways what it's doing, though, is increasing the commercial logic and commercial pressure. Because they've got to get you so badly that they have to use tried and true methods that diminish, in some ways, the chances of creativity. Your margin of error is so slim that you can't take chances.

Does MTV now have specific relationships with record companies?

Traditionally, it's been a source of great tension, because they have had the sort of monopoly over the music video industry since the early 1980s, and they had deals with the major record labels. And, once again, there are only five companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States and 80 percent of the music worldwide. They've had exclusive deals where they could be the first ones to get the videos for a certain amount of time before anyone else could get them, which basically was a clearly anti-competitive mechanism. There would be no competition with MTV.

And since they're sort of the gatekeeper now, basically, you've got to go through them for certain types of artists to have any hope of really winning out. They have very close relationships to the record labels--extremely close-- and the decisions they make go a long way toward determining the success or failure of acts and of certain releases.

How is MTV the ultimate gatekeeper of the American music industry?

It's not the only one. The radio system, too, is also an important gatekeeper. The internet is a minor gatekeeper now, but it may become a more important one later. But MTV has been very important for the past 20 years. It's a crucial gatekeeper because so many people watch it, and if an artist is on there, the chances of success increase exponentially. If an artist isn't on there, the chances are very slim.

It's like if you're on the ballot for an election or you're a write-in. If you're on the ballot, you've got a shot. If you're a write-in, your chances go way down. And that's what happens, which is why these companies are desperate to work with MTV to get their artist on the air, get them covered by MTV, get them promoted. If you're planning a marketing plan, if you're a music label, MTV's a crucial part of your strategy. You've got to figure out, "Will MTV support my artist and how can we get them to support our artist? What sort of promotional efforts can we do with MTV?" It's a key player in the whole operation now.

I can talk about the industrial relationship between small independent and big labels and how they get swallowed up and how that can affect the music industry, if you want. But I can't really talk about the content of the music in any great detail

The micro-label subsidiaries of real big labels--are they real?

Sure, they're real in the sense they physically exist, philosophically. But the independent labels historically played a very important role in the music industry, just like small businesses play an important role in all industries. They do the research and development that would be too costly for the big company to do. The minute they strike something, the big company just buys it out. And big companies in the music industry, as in other industries, discovered it's a lot cheaper to let a thousand people kill themselves trying the make a fortune on the margins and buy the ones that are successful than trying to bankroll all thousand.

And that's what the small labels do now. That's their function in our music industry. They all kill themselves trying to find the next Nirvana, the next real thing. Then if they stumble on something, they get bought out. Subpop Records, which was responsible for Nirvana and grunge, is the classic case in point. A terrific independent label, and then they sell it for $50 million or $100 million to Time Warner, once they make it big. Does that then affect the nature of the content of those labels? Of course it does, because when an Innerscope or a Subpop is bought, or when they have a relationship with a major label . . . the major label is implicitly saying, "We want more of that stuff that makes money. We didn't buy you to make artistic statements. We bought you to produce another Nirvana and another Pearl Jam and another number one hit."

And that often changes a logic of how these labels work in the first place--which were much closer to the ground, that were more concerned with good music, and that the commercial side would then take care of itself if you come up with great artists. But now that you get the commercial value more in the front seat, you're looking at, "Well, does this person look like they'd be a good grunge singer? Do they have a same sound as Nirvana?" instead of, "Do they have their own distinct sound?" So I think the effects are largely negative, but they play a very important role, and that will always be an important role.

I think the concern about the internet and Napster is that there's a good chance that that ultimately might be what it will do--be a farm system for these commercial giants. They will let the internet sort of breed these, and then they can pluck the ones that look like they have a following.

There's the argument that these companies do market research, so they must be giving the people what they want, because obviously they're studying what people want, so they have to give it to them. That's really a fallacious argument. It doesn't stand up to close analysis. What they're trying to do is find out how they can make the most money off of people. So they're going to query them, to see what the areas of entry are. It's not an honest examination of what people really want.

I'll give a couple of examples. In the early to mid-1990s, the ad industry in the United States did a survey of people to find out if they wanted any advertising on the internet, and how they felt about it. And something like two-thirds of Americans said, "We want no commercialism on the internet." Well, obviously that was something that was thrown in the wastebasket, because you can't make any money off that. So that meant, "How can we get commercials on the internet without pissing these people off?" That becomes the way you deal with it, not an honest effort to say, "Well, okay. How can we have a non-commercial internet?" No, but a dishonest effort: "How can we manipulate people to have a commercial internet and not piss them off, so we can make as much money as possible?"

A second example?

A second example is a historical one from the period I've studied in the 1930s. The vast majority of Americans wanted no advertising on radio when radio started in the early 1930s. It was a very intrusive and obnoxious form of advertising, compared to print advertising. You would be listening to a show or music or something, and all of a sudden some sales pitch for mouthwash would come on. Most Americans just thought it was obnoxious. They hated it. But despite this fact, the commercial broadcasters were not going to give them ad-free radio, because they couldn't make money off it. So they just had to come up with ways to make advertising more palatable, and not honor the legitimate desires of the American people.

Young people we've talked to experience rage because of this, and then the rage seems to end up being exploited.

Yes, it seems to be, in terms of the sort of rage for no particular reason, except for the rage for the hell of it, so to speak. I think that the rebellion notion of popular music and rock 'n roll is a strong part of it, the punk, grunge, all of it. . . . It's always been so, going right back to the beginning of rock 'n roll. And it's something that is increasingly marketed. Maybe because of the commercialism--although I'm not an expert at cultural content--but maybe that accounts for the fact that it seems more and more mindless. Right now, the Sex Pistols seem like some pretty heavy intellectuals, compared to the sort of stuff that's marketed up as rage today. There actually seemed to be something there, even in the nihilism.

Does the content get sucked out of the gesture?

Yes. It's like, "We need rage, so we have to push these buttons to hit this marketing group, because this demographic that buys this type of blue jeans needs to be pissed off. So we have to give them something to be angry at, or else they won't buy these blue jeans, won't buy this hair dye," or something like that. That's the motivation for it. That's the logic behind it. No one would ever accuse the Sex Pistols of selling out . . . because they were trying to discourage tourism to the UK and encourage it to Ireland because they were paid for by the Irish Tourist Bureau. You understood they were just pissed off. There was a legitimate nihilism there.

When companies are looking for buttons to push, are rage and anger easier buttons to push?

Well, with this demographic, it might be. But when they're going to the 12-year-old girl market, then they're going to . . . come up with an 'N Sync or Backstreet Boys. It's all done by marketing, though. Clearly, you find the sorts of the things that work. . . . One of the ironies is that we think the commercial marketplace of ideas is going to satisfy all our needs, because it's in the interest of the marketers. In fact, it almost works the opposite way.

Once you find something that works, everyone else apes it, and you just run it into the ground and everything else is forgotten. "Oh, Backstreet Boys works with 12-year-old girls?" Then you've got 500 Backstreet Boys. Now some rage thing works for 17-year-old white guys in the suburbs. Then you've got 500 people doing the same thing. So the marketplace, ironically, almost has this sort of monoculture built into it, because logically you're trying to always ape what worked last week. And you don't want to take chances. You lose your job when you take chances and it flops. No one's going to be fired for doing the second Backstreet Boys, but if you go out and do the first thing of something else . . . and that flops, then you're history.

Now "Dawson's Creek" is going to have real issues in it. Is that a valid way to spread issues and real life and good content back to the masses?

I guess I'd rather have "Dawson's Creek" deal with real issues than with inane issues. So I certainly would not discourage them from doing that. But is that going to ultimately be a successful way to really have a vibrant culture? Probably not. There's no evidence to think that, if the commercial logic that so dominates the content of these shows was at all in conflict with the idea of doing a show on an important issue, it's hard to believe that the issue would overwhelm the commercial logic.

If, for example, a show with a girl having an abortion would antagonize a significant part of the base and hurt advertising sales, the track record is that it's just not going to be done, period. Take the classic case in the early 1980s, when they did the show "The Day After" or something about the nuclear war. They couldn't sell ads for it, but it had the highest ratings ever. So therefore you don't do shows about serious topics if it hurts the commercial imperative. And you haven't seen any more shows like that since then. But we've seen plenty of shows on JonBenet Ramsey and the "Long Island Lolita," because those things sell lots of ads.

So there's a big difference between audience ratings and commercial viability?

Sure, there can be. And it becomes circular, because basically, you're not given that choice of "The Day After" very often. You're never given a choice of a show about nuclear war just so you can really factor it in, except once every 10 or 20 years and it's an accident. So you're usually just picking from commercial choices. That's the range of things. So they said, "Well, everyone picked this," but they didn't have a choice of something without ads. They didn't have a choice of something on a topic that wouldn't be done for a commercial reason. That would be a legitimate survey, but then focus groups would never even ask that.

There was a great piece by the Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchins, where he talks about how he was involved in one of these focus groups a few years ago for a primetime TV show. They were showing him a pilot for a new show with a bunch of other people, and they were supposed to rate it. They wanted to get opinions on it so they could tweak it a little bit to get it popular.

And he said that, when you left, everyone in the group was pissed off, because it was such a circular thing. They were only asking certain types of questions. They never asked something like, "What do you think of the show in general?" It was always, "Well, what do you think of this character's haircut," or "Is that character's butt too big?" or "Is that joke funny enough?" But they just wanted to say, "We think the whole thing stinks. We'd like a show on something else," but that was off-limits. The focus group was only interested in what they could do to make money off of that investment, period.

When GE runs NBC, is there more content that can't show up? How does corporate America's obvious focus . . . rob these young people?

It's hard to answer that, because there are so many factors in people's lives to really evaluate, does it make kids happier and healthier or does it hurt them? Look at the American Pediatric Association, which is really young kids, or the American Psychological Association, when they do their studies. I think that the evidence is increasingly clear that being awash in sort of a commercial marination, as American children and teenagers are today, does not make happier people. The evidence is clear that we have a generation that's not especially happy, and it should be a troubling sign for all of us.

It's a tough area, because there are so many other factors, you hesitate about sounding like a vulgar social critic. But in 1970, some sociologists did surveys of teenagers all over the world to see who were the happiest teenagers, who feel best about their world their lives. And the three groups of teenagers that were regarded as the happiest teenagers in the world in 1970 were in Israel, Cuba, and Chile. And those were highly non-commercial cultures--all three of them.

It's interesting to look at Chile, because Chile at that time was a very democratic society. It had a very high rate of voter turnout. It was very political--the most political society, arguably, in the world-- certainly in the Third World. They had a coup d'etat, they established a free market economy, a so-called "free market economy," and they consciously tried to de-politicize the people when they reinstated democracy.

Now it's a highly commercial culture. If you go to Chile, the middle class of Chile is conscious of brand-names. They don't know anything about politics. And now they've got one of the most depressed groups of teenagers. But it's considered a great victory in the New York Times and in our media, because it's a free society now. It's a democracy. But it's also a society where people aren't very happy, and it's a deeply troubled society, obsessed with brand-names.

That's anecdotal evidence. I would never use that in the court of law to convict, but I think there is considerable evidence that this type of world does not produce happy people. This isn't really what people are meant to be--basically recipients of marketing messages to define themselves by purely commercial terms. And that really shouldn't surprise us. Look at every major religion, every theology. None of them would define a good life or a happy person on the basis of something as meaningless as their possessions, what they own, or how many more they own than someone else, or having a different brand-name. In fact, that really violates almost all our philosophical and moral notions of what a good person and a good life is; and for good reason, because it is a bogus life.

What is the emotional-spiritual-ethical effect of having all of your authentic cultural artifacts sucked up into this machine?

It really promotes the sort of world in which you don't think anything matters unless it serves you, unless it serves your material gain. Why be honest? Why have integrity? Why care about other people? That's for chumps. It's all about taking care of number one. The dominant institutions in society, the values they send out is, "We're just here to make money off of you. We're just here to take advantage of you." The message that goes out to everyone in that system is, "Yes, everyone should be everyone for themselves. Just take care of number one. Why should I care about that other person? What's in it for me?"

And that's not a healthy environment for society. People are not islands. That's not new. We're social creatures. It creates very unhappy people when we stop caring about each other, when we just think what happens to us is all that matters.

And kids can find something like the Insane Clown Posse experience and get camaraderie until it gets sucked back. . . .

So the sales of the music go down and the label fires the band and creates a new band and probably their marketing says, "Now we've got to shift over to this technique."

Do you care about big companies buying big companies and what effect there is on content?

That side isn't really that important. What's happened in the media in the United States in the past 10 or 15 years, especially since about 1994 or 1995, has been an unprecedented concentration of ownership. So we have seven or eight companies now, which own these largest media companies. All are film studios. All are TV networks. Four of the five music companies that sell 90 percent of the music in the United States own almost all the TV stations in the largest markets. They're huge conglomerates, and this is really a new thing. It used to be that the largest media companies, 20 or 40 years ago, only produced newspapers, they only made movies, they only had a TV network. Now they're dominant players in each of these markets. They're highly non-competitive. They don't have to worry about a newcomer coming in. The barriers to entry, as economists talk about, are so high that basically, they've got a private club. It's a gentleman's club of about a half-dozen, seven, eight companies that really rule the thing.

They're closely linked. They know each other. They have deals together. And what they're able to do with this tremendous power between them is hyper-commercialize their content without fear of competitive retribution.

Radio is a classic case in point of how that works, and the company Viacom, which owns MTV, is a big player in this. In 1996, radio was deregulated by the federal government. This is public property, so the government has a right to say how many stations you're allowed to own. Well, in the 1996 Telecom Act, without a shred of debate in Congress or any hearings discussing it, the ownership restrictions were lifted on radio from 28 stations for one single company to as many as they wanted to own. And you were allowed to own up to eight in the largest markets. Overnight, over half these stations in America were sold from small companies to big companies, and big companies to huge ones.

So you have a handful of companies like Viacom that now dominate American radio. Every market now usually has two or three companies that dominate it, that own almost all the stations and sell relevant advertising. What's happened to American radio is a classic case, then, of this hyper-commercialism, on one hand. The amount of advertising on American radio today is 18 minutes per hour. It's something like 50 percent more than the early 1990s, because these companies don't have to worry about competition. Two or three of them own all the stations. They don't have to worry about someone coming in doing eight minutes an hour and stealing away their listeners. So it gets hyper-commercialized.

The only time there isn't advertising, they're selling payola. Whoever buys the most ads get their artists played. And you can see built into that that it's a very negative thing to have concentrated ownership, because it increases the ability to hyper-commercialize.

Then you add in conglomerates. Viacom also owns MTV and Paramount and Blockbuster. And now they can go to advertisers and say, "Well, you advertise on our radio chain, the CBS . . . stations we own, and maybe work out a deal with MTV or maybe work out a deal on VH1. Or we can do posters in our Blockbuster stores or do something on Showtime or maybe we can have "Entertainment Tonight," which is a TV show we produce, do something on your stuff, too." It gives them tremendous leverage to do much more commercialism than they could do if they only owned one thing. And that's the reigning logic behind the entire system. It's based on concentration and hyper-commercialism.

And it's done not because these are bad people. These people are no worse or better than their predecessors were 50 years ago. It's done because this is what the system is set up to produce. This is the logical thing to do. If you don't do it, you can't compete. You're going to be put out of business. You're out of work. So it's really a systematic issue. It's not of the morality of individuals.

For the parents and teens watching this--what are the first steps towards eradicating that?

The first steps would be hard to say. Ultimately, I think we have to change the nature of the system. When you talk about cable television, when you talk about over-the-air television--this is public property. The companies that rule it are there because they've got monopoly licenses from the government, either to have cable systems or access to channels on the airwaves. So the public has a right to intervene there and say, "These are the terms we want."

For example, in Sweden they allow no advertising to children under 12 as the condition of broadcasting. You can't advertise there to children under 12. The public has a right to do that here. We have a right to set real limits on the amount of advertising and commercialism that reach people under 18. We have the constitutional and moral right to do that

Ultimately, we have to think like Sweden--think big and really get to the root of the problem. Just eliminate this hyper-commercialism aimed at children, at teenagers. I think that's the direction we need to go in. That seems probably far off--maybe even impossible--given the strength and power of these media companies. But there are things you can do at the local level. You can go to your school board. The same companies that are hyper-commercializing MTV are interested in commercializing your schools. Try to keep advertising out of your schools.

Try to keep non-commercial things, like public television, non-commercial. Try to limit the advertising and commercialism in public media that are supposed to be ad-free. Keep those as a sector, as an island of non-commercial entertainment, news, and journalism in our culture. Likewise, you can do things like insist that your schools do media literacy--real media literacy.

There are two types of media literacy. There's the type that actually teaches you how the system works, what advertisers are trying to do, so you learn to understand it to be a critical participant. Then there's the type that the media companies want to do, which is basically to train you to like certain types of shows, but not to question the system. Get real media literacy done by honest intellectuals and academics, not by PR people for the media companies and the ad industry. That can help, too. Make people aware of what to do.

The great communication theorist Marshall McLuhan has a wonderful line about commercialism. He says, "We don't know who discovered water, but it probably wasn't a fish." And one of the problems with commercialism is that we're so immersed in it, at a certain point, we lose our ability to see it critically.

That's why something like media literacy in schools can be so important--to make kids aware at a very early age that it isn't natural, that it wasn't always like this. "Think of it critically. Someone's doing it because they benefit by it. This is why. This is what they're trying to do to you." So you can arm yourself and understand the nature of the relationship early on, and be a critical participant in society, and not just someone who's manipulated by marketers.

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