THE MUSIC MACHINE : MTV’S BIG PITCH FOR NEW SUCCESS ETHIC A SELLOUT

Just by coincidence, the atom bomb and MTV both celebrated anniversaries within a few days of each other. MTV, the “video music” channel, is the first TV network to look as good as its commercials, but then MTV is a commercial, a 24-hour-a-day advertisement for the record business.

MTV videos--tireless pluggers of albums, singles, and movies--are flashily produced closet commercials frequently interrupted for real commercials. If MTV is a triumph of anything, it is a triumph of marketing and cross-promotionalism.

Now 4 years old, MTV has been attacked through much of its life for videos featuring heavy metal groups whose message is anti-social, pro-drug or satanic. A group called Grim Reaper romps through a ditty called “See You in Hell”: “See you in hell, my friend See you in hell, my friend See you in hell, my friend I’ll see you in hell.” If only Cole Porter had lived to write that.

These days, MTV is downplaying the swaggering, pseudo- macho sort of tripe for another sort: the wholesome uplifter. REO Speedwagon sings “Live Every Moment,” and Billy Joel sings “Second Wind” in a video meant to discourage teen-age suicide. Then there’s Bruce Springsteen, the most publicized human since Genghis Khan. His videos celebrate baseball and beer drinking and, lest we forget, Mom’s apple pie.

You could say MTV has gone establishment, but it always was establishment. It’s an inhuman machine built to sell jeans, records and movies to affluent kids.

One difference between today’s kids and those of the ‘60s is that, back then, we wouldn’t have accepted a culture handed to us through television by a huge corporation. Corporations and television were suspect then.

MTV is a victory for the new success ethic. Kids don’t seem to mind constantly being pitched products and rock stars gaudily flaunting their wealth. They may wear chains and jeans and T-shirts, but underneath all that phony garb, they’re really wearing three-piece suits.

Their credo is summed up in the title of a current MTV hit: “Money for Nothing.”

On MTV, symbols, words and pictures are stripped of that old nuisance called meaning and just flashed by in pointless profusion. The only politics is the politics of affluence. Posing as “rebels,” rock stars rebel against things like table manners, going to school and obeying the 55 m.p.h. speed limit. MTV soaks up cultural references from the past and reprocesses them as decor.

The network’s clever animated logos and promos are probably the best in the business (MTV almost always looks mahvelous ), but they ridicule the idea of having any interest in the real world outside the silly rock realm. A current MTV promo begins with an announcer pretending to discuss the big bang theory and the possible existence of a “higher intelligence.” This is chased off the screen as a voice says, “Who cares? It’s party time!”

It’s always party time on MTV, but it’s a wan sort of partying, the kind a corporation would mandate for its employees during business hours. It’s always business hours on MTV, too. As a company, MTV is run like a fortress. Inquiries from the press are met with chilly officious evasiveness.

Even if MTV is not actually watched, just having it on in the room has a strangely numbing, lulling effect, more so than with regular TV. MTV manages to be even emptier than TV already was. If you watch it for more than 30 minutes straight, you may be overcome with tele-torpor, a state of semi-consciousness caused by excessive video vegetation.

Unquestionably, MTV has been influential, in more ways than just the uncountable number of rock-video shows on the air. According to the fall season forecast of the Dancer Fitzgerald Sample ad agency, several prime-time network shows will be following “Miami Vice” down the MTV trail in the coming season. Among them are “The Insiders,” about a rock ‘n’ roll reporting team, and “Hollywood Beat,” about a rock ‘n’ roll cop team.

The big novel on campus right now, “Less Than Zero,” is riddled with MTV references. Characters always seem to have MTV turned on, whether they are engaged in meaningless conversation or in meaningless depravity.

Television has been called “chewing gum for the eyes.” MTV is a sitz bath for the brain. Staying in too long surely leads to shrinkage.