Sound Check — Geoff Carter: ‘Fight Club’ stirs memories of MTV’s salad days

Friday, Oct. 22, 1999 | 9:52 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@vegas.com.

Funny. After seeing David Fincher's alpha-male epic "Fight Club" the other night I found myself not thinking of the film's underlying themes, but of MTV.

I began watching MTV almost at its beginning; the Southern California cable company that served our neighborhood picked it up in late 1982. There weren't many promotional music clips then -- perhaps 50 all told -- and the repeat factor was numbing, yet I watched for days at a time entranced by what cultural critics would soon dub "visual music."

Lots of people hated MTV. Rolling Stone ran a hit piece on the channel, denigrating it as "reducing rock music to a series of advertising jingles." David Bowie took to task one of MTV's "VJ's," Mark Goodman, over the channel's apparent disinterest in playing music videos made by black artists. And as incredible as it may seem, the channel had trouble securing enough advertising for the entire broadcasting day; five-minute "instrumental breaks," played against stock space exploration footage, were not uncommon back then.

MTV today bears little or no resemblance to its root product. I hardly ever see music videos on the channel when I flip by; usually I see a repeat episode of the atrocious "Real World," or people touching each other in the swimsuit area to the music of Ruff Ryders. Advertisers rush to ingratiate themselves to them, and the channel has become lucrative enough to bear offspring (M2, an all-video music channel, and MTV Films, the big-screen production arm that released this year's best dark comedy, "Election," and a lot of teen-angsty stinkfests).

Which brings us back to "Fight Club" and its grab bag of rock video cliches (director Fincher once made videos for the likes of the Rolling Stones and Madonna, in addition to commercials for Nike). As I said before the film had something to say, but I didn't hear it. I was too distracted by the jump cuts, fly-perspective camera stunts and underlit, post-apocalyptic sets to think about what the film had to say to me. The weight of describing the visuals was laid squarely on Edward Norton's narration, just as Duran Duran's "Rio" was expected to explain director Russell Mulcahy's color-saturated lunacy.

Both entities did the best possible job under the circumstances, but were crushed under the weight of the visuals. The plot of "Fight Club," predictably, was reduced to a jingle.

Rock video is now the acknowledged testing ground for young directorial talent. Antoine Fuqua went from directing Coolio to "The Replacement Killers," while Alex Proyas used his experience making Cure videos to create the worlds of "Dark City" and "The Crow." The latter seems to have settled nicely into his new medium -- the visuals serve the characters and mood, as they should -- but for every Proyas there seems to be three Fuquas, with their rapid-fire editing and perfunctory grasp of story. Why develop characters when you can bring out the double-fisted guns, crank up the CGI effects and Coolio and go with what you know?

Enough already. MTV has long outlasted its usefulness as a factory for dreams, and the worship of MTV has reduced the potency of modern-day storytelling. Let's pull the plug on the channel and its various permutations, and let's return to that sensibility in which every song made a different picture and dreaming was an act of will and not of submission.

Stereo Dynamics

Sasha, "Xpander EP," Ultra Records; Breakbeat Era, "Ultra-Obscene," 1500 Records: I have an older friend whom I discuss music with. He's in his mid-40s, old enough to have seen punk happen the first time. His tastes run deeply into the eclectic, far more deeply than mine do, but we both agree about one thing: Nearly all of the innovation currently happening in popular music is happening inside, or parallel to, the Electronica genre. Two recent releases, by superstar DJ Alexander "Sasha" Coe and funky trio Breakbeat Era, bear out this assertion.

Sasha's "Xpander EP" has just five tracks -- two of them mixes of the title track -- but has a nearly 50-minute running time. To call what it does in that time hypnosis is underselling it -- the feeling it imparts is more akin to sonically induced rapture. Sasha folds beats and melodies on top of each other as neatly as a stack of hotel towels. Although phrases are repeated, you never feel as if you're passing the same tired beats over and over; rather, the action builds and releases, creating a different-shaped hill and valley each time. There's nothing random about "Xpander." Everything has a place and everything is where it belongs.

The same is true of Breakbeat Era, although unlike Sasha, the soundscape of "Ultra-Obscene" was beaten, not caressed, by its creators. The group produces the sexiest, smartest club beats you've heard out of a techno-funk group with a female vocalist since Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart hung their synths to the wind. A triple-threat outfit featuring DJ Die, drum n' bass whiz kid Roni Size and singer-songwriter Lennie Laws, Breakbeat Era makes strides in sound and form as significant as the group's name implies. If "Bullitproof" isn't a four-minute, 33-second riot, at least it sounds like one. Revolutions have sprung up from far less.

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