Coming to You Wherever You Are: MuchMusic, MTV and Youth Identities

by Kip Pegley
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2008
168 pp., illus. 2 b/w. Trade, $70.00; paper, $24.95
ISBN-10: 978-0-8195-6889-4; ISBN-13: 978-0-8195-6870-0.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

jzilberg@illinois.edu

“It’s easier for us to operate in Vietnam and Lebanon than it is to operate in Canada.Canada’s about the only country in the world we have a problem operating with . . . if MTV is not bad for people in Poland, what’s the problem with Canada.” Tom Freston former MTV Networks Chairman and CEO, in Pegley 2008, p.5.

Kip Pegley’s Coming to You Wherever You Are is an important cross-cultural reading of music video and extra-musical content on MTV and MuchMusic in Canada during one a week in early November, 1995. A short but dense book, it often reads as a published dissertation or analytic report. Nevertheless, it will present interesting, theoretically informed and challenging reading to those interested in youth culture, mass media and national imaginaries. As an analysis of how Canadian music television programming and content reflects and informs a national sense of a plural collective, it adds an important case study to the literature on popular music and the mass media. For anthropologists, the most useful chapter, based on field research and interviews conducted in 2000, 2001 and 2003, compares MuchMusic in Canada to the after-school music video program Jyrki in Finland. Using the Finish case to support her argument for the Canadian data, Pegley’s study is above all a critique of MTV that attempts a robust defense of protectionist measures to keep MTV out of the Canadian market.

Pegley began her musical career in a conservative classical setting from which she sought escape. Her writing is at its most engaging at the start when she takes us into her world as a teenager returning late at night from orchestra concerts, turning on NBC’s Friday night Videos while pulling off her restrictive black clothing, and settling back to enjoy the verboten music of Night Ranger, Peter Gabriel and Journey. Eventually her musical and gendered rebellion, coinciding with the emergence of popular musical studies as a viable discipline, allowed her to abandon Lulu and Elektra for Madonna and Janet Jackson. There she found herself marginalized once again in her antipathy towards MTV’s aggressive media imperialism and her view of the hegemony of MTVism in American cultural studies. Accordingly, there is a strong biographical element informing this study in which the author has managed to forge an academic career out of a life long interest in music and media and the role they can play in energizing non-mainstream identities, not least of all, her own.

Pegley’s study is above all an example of the Canadian identity project in the academic sphere and it is possible that the explicitly pro-MuchMusic agenda and oppositional stance to American identity as conflated with MTV has over-determined the analysis. She argues that Canadians have been rightly protective of their cultural industries as part of a national identity project that involves protecting and fostering difference and marginality. While she argues that this explains why Canada was so successful in withstanding the MTV invasion, it could equally be argued that this was the result of a protectionist law. What is needed is an ethnographic re-assessment of the relative popularity of MTV versus MuchMusic and how media and society in Canada has changed since the mid 1990’s.

One wonders what the youth felt about these restrictions, how they got around them with satellite and the internet. She provides this type of comparative reflection grounded in youth experience in her analysis of Finland’s version of MuchMusic –Jyrki. Decidedly more engaging, it effectively allows her to recapitulate her interpretations of the Canadian case study, though by her own admission it stands very much alone from the rest of the study. Commentary on the analysis of extra-musical content aside, in order to more adequately address issues of the body and identity, what is really needed is ethnographic material about reception, interpretation and embodiment -a longstanding problem across the board particularly in cultural studies which she goes some distance towards achieving in the final chapter on Jyrki.

Interestingly enough, Pegley notes in her conclusion that no statistical differences could be found between lyric content on MTV and MuchMusic in terms of race, gender and nationality. Though she had assumed that there should have been a stark difference, there was none to be found. Holding to her thesis, she nevertheless proposes that these differences can be found “embedded within complex, sometimes seemingly contradictory sets of texts . . . .” In order to reveal these differences, she focuses on extra-musical content and argues that this content, and programming differences, reflect and reinforce Canadian multicultural values. She emphasizes that these plural collective values are in direct contrast to American values of “robust individualism” as purveyed through MTV. Apparently while MuchMusic is genuine, spontaneous and accessible, MTV is an impenetrable highly sexualized masculine threat - in essence, a violation of Canadian cultural mores. Pegley concludes that even if MTV was able to eventually circumvent Canadian government policy, Canadians would not embrace it as its extra-musical content is not in accordance with local values.

Ultimately, Coming to You wherever You Are is arguably a classic example of a Canadian intellectual’s commitment to a national identity project. It would be fascinating to revisit this study and re-assess it both in light of MTV’s subversive penetration of the Canadian market and the hyper-sexualization crisis as explored in the documentary film Sexy Inc.: Our Children Under Influence by Sophie Bissonette (2008). Aside from the impending reviews by cultural theorists in the US and elsewhere, and for what the study offers for third and fourth wave feminist studies, it would above all be interesting to be privy to the reactions of MTV executives to her analysis. There we might find that it might well be these media executives who will pay the closest attention to the specifics of her surgical ideological analysis - in order to best capitalize upon it – wherever you are.