Transmission and Transgression. Gary Kenton

intrinsic properties, and in the way they impact human senses. The chart below provides a visual overview of the dichotomies and incongruities between rock ‘n’ roll and television.←71 | 72→

      Table 3.1. The Misalignment of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Television

Rock ‘n’ Roll	Television
Folk Art and Popular Medium	Mass Medium
Ear / Sound	Eye / Sight
Non-Linear / Figurative	Linear / Literal
Kinetic / Mobile	Static / Fixed
Authentic	Illusory / Delusory
Democratic / Subversive	Autocratic / Conservative
Hot / High Fidelity and Definition	Cool / Low Fidelity and Definition
Discursive / Connotational	Non-discursive / Denotational
Appealing to Adolescents	Appealing to Pre- and Post-Adolescents

      Source: Author.

      When one medium is transmitted or otherwise filtered through another medium, the process is called remediation. When this takes place, both the original, filtered medium and the filtering medium are impacted. Building on the observations of Edmund Carpenter, Marshall McLuhan, and others, Joshua Meyrowitz suggests “seeing each medium as its own language” and focusing on its “unique ‘grammar’” (“Multiple” 99). He submits that television contains the grammar variables of audio plus many others, which means that someone listening to/watching rock music on television is asked to attend to multiple sets of potential presentation and production conditions. In contemporary America, we are invariably exposed to more than one medium at a time. We live in a world of what Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin call hypermediacy, the digital environment “in which representation is conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself—with windows that open on to other representations or other media” (34). Hypermediacy can also refer to the constant movement from platform to platform, the non-linear logic of the digital link as opposed to the sequential, one-thing-at-a-time logic of the book.

      The effects of remediation are minimized when the filtering medium is closely functionally aligned with the filtered medium. When we listen to a recording, for example, the transfer of content from artist to record to sound system is relatively seamless; the medium of the phonograph disappears. One of the reasons that surface noise and needle skips are annoying is because they force the remediation process back into our consciousness. The medium of television is not well aligned with rock ‘n’ roll, a marriage of convenience and commerce rather than function or aesthetics. Music on television generally attempts to recreate the elements of live performance, but Arnold Wolfe points out that the “in-concert mode of visualiza←72 | 73→tion is anomalous for television because it is essentially an attempt to reproduce a stage show [that is] blocked laterally, proscenium style” whereas television is “most effectively blocked for depth” (45).

      In the post-War years, television was in transition from an immature, mostly live medium, to one in which programming became increasingly rationalized, formatted, and packaged. Rock ‘n’ roll posed significant challenges for television management in this regard. In addition to the technical difficulties involved in presenting a predominantly aural method of communication through a visual medium, musicians needed a crash course in the art of performance on a set as opposed to a stage. Although the networks were eager to attract young viewers, controlling the process and the product created a dilemma for television producers, especially compared to other types of programming. For their part, musicians were happy for the exposure but rarely thrilled with the way that they, or their music, came off on the small screen. As John Lennon put it during a 1968 interview on The Tonight Show when asked why doing a TV show made him nervous he replied, “Because this situation isn’t natural.”¹⁰ And Lennon, of course, was an A-list celebrity with some control over when and where he appeared; most musicians fortunate enough to get on TV were expected to comply with whatever demands were made of them. If television rarely achieved a true synthesis of sight and sound, it is partly due to the fact that it was rarely attempted. If television was a meal, rock ‘n’ roll was just a side-dish.

      Lawrence Grossberg indicates that, although the cultural referents have often been similar, the audiences for television and rock are quite distinct. Television caters to viewers at the higher and lower ends of the age spectrum, seldom zeroing in on adolescents except as topics of amusement or derision. By virtue of its broad demographic and its place in the American living room, television was about domesticity, while rock ‘n’ roll was about mobility (think “I Get Around”). This helps to explain why, when rock ‘n’ roll began to pop up on television in the 1950s, there was a shocked, unsuspecting public of older people, and an eager, suspecting public of teenagers. “For many fans,” Grossberg says, “television has been often seen as part of the dominant culture against which rock culture is defined” (189). McLuhan borrowed the terms “figure” and “ground” from the vocabulary of painting to describe how the focus of the viewer is directed to the subject even as his/her perception is largely determined (literally “framed”) by the setting in which it is presented. As Jim Curtis writes, “rock ‘n’ roll is the figure, and we have usually perceived it against the ground of television” (12). Even if the primary conversation between musicians and audience took place on radio, records and concert stages, television became for many the foremost conveyor and arbiter of pop culture of which rock music is a part.