Word: tunings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...intelligence of Ted Koppel, the authority and credibility of Walter Cronkite in his heyday and the popularity of Johnny Carson. When his show comes on French TV every Friday night, right after a dubbed version of Miami Vice, it is something of a national event. Some 6 million people tune in faithfully -- cab drivers as well as business executives, concierges as well as intellectuals. But even more remarkable than the lofty status of Bernard Pivot is the subject of his program: books...
...roll. The infant art form embraced gospel and country, blues and ballads. Blacks cohabited with whites on the Top 40; boys packing sexual threat in their jeans shared the bill with girls tenderized in lacquer and lace. The mood could be tender too. On the radio, a slow tune just naturally followed an up-tempo number; it was the heartbeat of teen America. The 19-year-old Aretha Franklin could take a Broadway spiritual like Meredith Willson's Are You Sure and transform it into a righteous steeple raiser. Baby, that was rock and roll...
Auntie Ree emerged in the early '60s as part of an impressive sorority -- soul sisters from all over. Cousin Dionne, working within the ricochet rhythms of Burt Bacharach's songs, built a brand-new bridge connecting gospel urgency to show-tune sophistication. Barbra Streisand moonlighted from Broadway and never went back. The jazz inflections of Nina Simone and Sarah Vaughan enriched the vocabulary of pop. The megaton voices of Jackie DeShannon, Dusty Springfield and Timi Yuro lent powerful shadings to love songs. And the girl groups -- all the -elles and -ettes, the Supremes and Shangri-Las -- kept teen pulses surging...
...those words on the radio 14 years ago. Had that boy earned the freedom to get his ears scorched as his father idly twisted the dial? (The court ruled that "patently offensive" language could be regulated on radio and TV.) Do other boys and girls have the freedom to tune in Midnight Blue, or to rent "documentary" snuff films like Faces of Death at their local video stores? Does any jerk with a movie camera have the freedom to exploit and profit from the weaknesses of his performers, his audience...
...heat, if you haven't noticed, is off. A month short of its sixth anniversary, MTV is singing a more troubled tune. Ratings have fallen off, and so has much of the excitement. A couple of hours spent watching MTV today reveal how quickly the avant-garde can become passe. With a few exceptions (the dazzling tattoo of animated images that illustrates Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer), videos have settled into a yawn-provoking rut. Typically they feature scenes of the band in performance intercut with snippets of a fanciful "story" or dressed up with now familiar visual gimmicks (cliche...