University of Illinois Press

Florestan and Butt-head: A Glimpse into Postmodern Music Criticism
Author(s): Andrew Dell'Antonio

Source: American Music, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 65-86
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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ANDREW DELL'ANTONIO
Florestan and Butt-head:

A Glimpse into Postmodern
Music Criticism
Thesupremelaw [of the cultureindustry]is that they shall not satisfy their
desiresat any price;theymustlaughand be contentwith laughter.
TheodorAdornoandMax Horkheimer
Mhehehehheh. . . hehheh--Huh huh. .. huhhuh...
Beavisand Butt-head,openingsoundtrack
fromtheMTV showBeavis & Butt-head,1993-
Much reviled in the press as avatars of teenage nihilism, banished

from prime time to late night owing to their purported encourage-
ment of impressionable young pyromaniacs, Beavis & Butt-head have
drawn a substantially larger audience than almost all other MTV pro-
grams: in 1995 the show grossed over $17 million in advertising rev-
enues for the network, and box office sales for their feature-length film
topped $55 million within the first two months of its December 1996
release. More significantly for the focus of this essay, Mike Judge's
creations have been the only MTV video-jockeys to address music
videos critically. While other programs merely present videos with-
out critique, Beavis and Butt-head overlay their soundtracks with
pointed, sometimes scathing criticism.
Such criticism often takes the form of statements along the lines of
"this video sucks" (admittedly not trenchantly insightful analysis). Yet
just as often the boys' comments do address relevant issues about the
video's imagery or musical style. And by interweaving insightful with
Dell'Antonio is Assistant Professorof Musicology at the University of Texas

at Austin. His research has focused on issues of genre, historiography,and
aesthetics, and particularlyon early seventeenth-centuryItalian repertories.
American Music Spring 1999
? 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

66 Dell'Antonio
trivial comments and video criticism with banal dialogue, the show's
writers depict the boys' critical process as seamlessly integrated into
their mundane activities. Beavis and Butt-head do not consider in-
terpretation a separate endeavor requiring "critical distance": they are
always in the process of performing critically. And the boys are not
merely listeners and spectators: they often sing and dance along with
videos, and use musical expression (usually some form of heavy metal
"air guitar") to punctuate particularly gratifying events in their lives.
Indeed, Beavis and Butt-head's intense interaction with music is what
most clearly defines their daily activities. Despite probably being the
most objectionable characters ever to grace prime-time television, the
boys are remarkably savvy musical consumers.
As depictions of critics whose interpretative (and even artistic) op-
erations are an integral part of daily life, Mike Judge's personae Bea-
vis and Butt-head reveal themselves to be cut from the same cloth as
Robert Schumann's critical personae Florestan and Eusebius. And in
their abandonment of critical distance and their purposeful depthless-
ness, in their constantly shifting subject positions, not to mention their
excessive, unbounded, and constantly unfulfilled desire (both sexual
and musical), the boys appear to be a textbook example of the "schizo-
phrenic," de-Oedipalized subject that has been seen as a result of post-
modern culture.
Beavis and Butt-head first made their appearance in a couple of brief

(five-minute) episodes on MTV's experimental animation program Liq-
uid Televisionin 1992. Overwhelmingly positive public response to the
over-the-top, grotesque plots and humor of the segments (in the first
episode the boys play "frog baseball" and attempt to progress to "dog
baseball"; in the second they attend a monster-truck rally and are con-
fronted with Sterculius, the Roman god of feces) led to MTV commis-
sioning a series of half-hour programs from their creator, animator
Mike Judge.' As counterpoint to the boys' grotesque adventures, Judge
introduced segments where Beavis and Butt-head watched and re-
sponded to portions of music videos; since the boys were portrayed
as heavy metal fans, this genre initially predominated on the show,
with the boys usually reacting by swaying, head-banging, or singing
along with the band during particularly exciting passages. When faced
with music they didn't like, the boys would urge each other to change
the channel, crying out "This sucks," belching, passing gas, or other-
wise expressing their disgust. While a number of MTV comedy shows
had been punctuated by segments of music videos, Beavis and Butt-
head were the first actually to acknowledge the music and react.
The boys' rise to stardom was momentarily jeopardized in the fall
of 1993, when they were accused of inspiring a five-year-old to set

Postmodern Music Criticism 67
fire to his family's trailer; while the accusation was spurious, fear of
negative publicity led MTV to move the show from a prime-time to
a late-night time slot.2 MTV censors also induced Mike Judge to tone
down Beavis's pyromania and, to some extent, the show's violence.3
Despite the time-slot change, the show continued its success-
which suggests that the appeal of Beavis & Butt-head was never pri-
marily to school-age children. In 1994 Rolling Stone dedicated a cov-
er to Beavis & Butt-head, suggesting that "50 million Beavis and
Butt-head fans can't be wrong"; the magazine observed, "Despite the
time change [from 7 to 10:30 P.M.],they still draw three times the net-
work's average audience."4 The boys' success can be partially mea-
sured by the fact that their comments were credited with destroying
the careers of some bands (for example, Winger and Warrant) and
boosting the success of others (Babes in Toyland and White Zombie).5
The move to a team-based writing approach for the show by the
second (1993) season led to more varied and subtle characterization
of the two boys: Butt-head became the leader and the more ground-
ed of the duo, while Beavis's sadism and pyromania spread into more
diffuse psychosis, making him the more creative and fanciful of the
pair. Increasingly complex characterization of the secondary charac-
ters in the show, particularly the adult males who are ever endeav-
oring (unsuccessfully) to provide a role model for the boys, led to an
increasing proportion of satire to slapstick. In fact, while Beavis and
Butt-head's outrageous behavior still drove the plot, the idiocy of the
"normal" characters surrounding them became more and more the
focus of the show's humor, and the humor became increasingly more
absurdist and satirical, and less scatological.
The boys' extraordinary success continued through 1996 with high
daily viewership despite the limited number of new episodes each
season.6 Following the extraordinary success of their feature-length
movie, Beavis & Butt-headDo America (released during the 1996 Christ-
mas season), the format of the show changed; perhaps partly because
of this change, the show's popularity waned somewhat.7
From 1993 through 1996, the format of the show was kept constant,
each half-hour show consisting of two fifteen-minute episodes. Each
episode contains a full story line, so that the boys' adventures are
portrayed in fifteen-minute blocks, a telegraphic pace that provides
a reductio ad absurdum of the narrative sketchiness of half-hour sit-
coms. To disrupt the narrative flow further, Beavis and Butt-head's
adventures are intermingled with segments in which the boys are
shown watching and commenting on portions of MTV videos; these
segments are unconnected to the story line.s Figure 1 illustrates the
sequence of narrative and video-watching segments in four typical
Beavis and Butt-head episodes. As the figure shows, the episodes con-

68 Dell'Antonio
CareerDay
TaintedMeat
"O
0
0._
Vidiots
Stewartis Missing
0 3 6 9 12 15
Minutes
I Story • Video Commercial
Figure 1. Comparisonof Segment Lengths in Four Episodes
sist of a regular alternation of narrative and video segments, with a

central commercial break that takes up roughly a third of each epi-
sode. No single segment is longer than two minutes, and many of the
narrative segments are shorter than a minute.9
Initially just an excuse for the boys to head-bang or make scato-
logical comments, the video segments developed into much more
complex critical commentary and dialogue, hand in hand with the
show's increasing use of satire. The increasing sophistication of the
show's humor is perhaps most noticeable in the video segments, for
while the idiotic behavior the boys perpetrate and encounter in the
course of the story segments is committed by fictional characters,
during the videos the spotlight is turned on music and performers
featured during MTV's regular programming, and frequently consists
of comments on the quirks and foibles of real-life rock and pop mu-
sic and video production.
In the video-watching segments, Beavis and Butt-head are seen sit-
ting side by side on a ratty couch; the view alternates between the TV
from the boys' perspective and the boys from the TV's perspective.
This device not only serves to connect the boys to the video they are
experiencing, but also encourages the viewer's identification with the
boys' subject position(s) through the reminder that the viewer, just like
the boys, is seeing this video on TV.ioThe visual aspect of the video is
frequently interrupted by scenes of the boys picking their noses,

fighting, or reacting to particularly steamy images; the soundtrack is

overlaid with the boys' dialogue--which alternates between comments
on the video at hand and banal repartee or crude noisemaking.
When Beavis and Butt-head encounter a video that strikes their fan-
cy, they frequently sing and dance along: their tastes run primarily
to heavy metal and rap/hip-hop (the latter tends to elicit most of their
dancing reactions, though punk/hardcore dancing also seems to ap-
peal to them). The story lines show the boys punctuating particular-
ly gratifying moments in their lives by singing and playing air gui-
tar, thereby further incorporating music into their everyday activity."
Beavis and Butt-head's commentary to the videos they watch indi-
cates that they are well aware of generic traits in the video, and are
highly conscious of stylistic borrowing, originality, and influence:
(During Van Halen's CAN'T STOP LOVING YOU)
Butt-head: This is kinda like a country video, you know...
'cause it has football players and, like, old people, and dogs
and stuff...
Beavis: Yeah, yeah, every time you watch TNN, all the videos
have that stuff in them...
Butt-head: Yeah, all they need now is a big pickup truck...
(from "Screamers," ? MTV 1995)
(During Iron Maiden's FROM HERE TO ETERNITY)
Butt-head: You can say what you want about Maiden, but when
it comes to making videos, they don't screw around!
Beavis: Yeah, yeah, even if Maiden did unplug, I bet they'd still
have explosions!12
Butt-head: Yeah, they'd be like, "We're not gonna unplug the ex-
plosion machine, dude.... That's what got us here."
(from "Take a Number," ? MTV 1994)
(During Stone Temple Pilots' PLUSH)
Butt-head: I heard these guys came first, and, like, Pearl Jam
ripped them off...
Beavis: No way, Butt-head-Pearl Jam came first!
Butt-head: Uhhhh, well, they both suck...
Beavis: Hey, Butt-head, Pearl Jam don't suck, they're from Seat-
tle!
Butt-head: Ohh yeah...
(from "Naked Colony," ? MTV 1993)
And Beavis displays occasional involuntary flashes of critical insight,
as during Korn's BLIND,when he makes himself hyperventilate, be-
comes glassy-eyed, and then begins speaking very quickly:

70 Dell'Antonio
Beavis: I think there's a problemwith this video. I think it's highly

derivative of many popular bands within the genre. Although
when viewed in its own merit, it does have groove; however
what it has in groove, it lacks in originality. One can't help be
reminded of such bands as Pearl Jam, White Zombie, Suicidal
Tendencies, and other bands that bear the mantle of alternative
rock. One is even reminded of Laurie Anderson when she wore
curlers.... This video speaks less to the heart and more to the
sphincter. In closing, I think Korn would do well to learn more
from... [Butt-head slaps Beavis to shut him up].
(from "Whiplash," ? MTV 1995)
This critical monologue is one of the very few instances in which Bea-
vis expresses himself in more than monosyllables. By associating it
with a self-inflicted loss of mental control on Beavis's part, the show's
writers depict critical acumen as underpinning Beavis's entire sub-
conscious thought process-despite his monumental idiocy at the
conscious level. The whole scene can, of course, be seen as a joke on
the banality of stereotypical rock criticism, but the parody cuts both
ways: is rock criticism even less brain-intensive than Beavis's usual
moronic output, or is Beavis able to engage with the music he con-
sumes at a more complex level than he realizes (or, perhaps, is will-
ing to let on)?
Beavis and Butt-head's inability to differentiate between what they
see on TV and real life extends to their understanding of the videos
they watch as "real," as an extension of everyday activity. The boys'
lives are spent in a constant search for opportunities to "score,"
though their understanding of what "scoring" means is repeatedly
shown to be extremely vague. Beavis and Butt-head clearly under-
stand the lives of the bands they idolize as a perpetual orgy of "scor-
ing"-of generalized sexual and musical fulfillment. Although the
boys define their lack of "scoring" in direct opposition to the plenty
they perceive in their MTV idols, they also do not perceive this op-
position as permanent or unbridgeable. The boys are constantly hatch-
ing plans to achieve "scoring" fulfillment in their day-to-day adven-
tures; they also constantly project themselves into the events in the
videos they watch, interacting with the band members as if the band
members were responding to them. During Joan Jett's Do YOUWAN-
NA TOUCH ME in the episode "The Crush," the boys respond to the
refrain that gives the video its title, expressing a desire to touch Jett;
Butt-head even touches the TV screen. Amid their crude references
to touching, the boys comment that Jett should put her address on
the screen so that they may find her and touch her. Once again the
boys see no division between the video and real life; their active re-

sponses to the video foreground the absurdity of Jett's question and

the notion of having a video about touching.
Beavis frequently displays a conviction that his interaction with a
video can indeed change the content of the video itself: for example,
he remains convinced that a singer will remove her clothes during a
video, despite Butt-head's insistence that they have seen the video
many times before and she has not; "Maybe this time she'll take her
clothes off," he suggests.13 In at least one instance, however, Beavis
paradoxically does appear to affect the content of the video: comment-
ing on Primus's DMV,he remarks that the video needs a picture of a
toilet, and just a few seconds later the image of a toilet appears in the
video (absolutely out of context) and Beavis indicates his approval.14
While Beavis does not actually change the content of the video (the pic-
ture of the toilet is a part of the pre-existing Primus video), the con-
ceit is clearly that Beavis has not seen this video before, and that he
therefore sees it as responding to his wish for a picture of a toilet.
The show's writers thus present us with a context where talking to
the TV and interacting with its contents are not only entirely natural
but even considered effective in shaping those contents-where the
boys' active, boundless desire can allow them to blur the line between
reality and fantasy-fulfillment. Granted, the boys are not really affect-
ing the content of the video, but the show's frame implies that their
comments have indeed "convinced" the video to provide a toilet for
Beavis.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their well-known anal-
ysis of the hegemonic nature of the "culture industry" (that is to say,
the culturally overpowering and only apparently benign mass media),
suggested that radio (and, by extension, television), unlike the tele-
phone, imposes its message with no possibility of response from the
listener.'5 E. Ann Kaplan goes further in her study of MTV as a post-
modern phenomenon, suggesting,
The [MTV] spectator has the illusion of being in control of the
"windows," whereas in fact the desire for plenitude that keeps
him/her watching is, in this case, forever deferred. The TV is se-
ductive precisely because it speaks to a desire that is insatiable-
it promises complete knowledge in some far distant and never-
to-be-experienced future.... [MTV] evokes a kind of hypnotic
trance in which the spectator is suspended in a state of unsatisfied
desire but forever under the illusion of imminent satisfaction
through some kind of purchase.16
But, as we have seen, Beavis and Butt-head do respond; indeed, they
are virtually incapable of watching and listening without simulta-
neously interacting with what they see and hear. And the boys' de-

72 Dell'Antonio
sire, while unsatisfied, does not paralyze them; it is the force that
drives their critical processes.
Belying Adorno and Kaplan's bleak picture of the public's passive
consumption of the products of the culture industry, the boys' inter-
actions with the videos illustrate the inherently active character of the
MTV spectator. This involvement is very much in keeping with the
participatory nature of rock music: while spectators at rock concerts
are not creating "the music itself" that the band is playing, their par-
ticipation (dancing, shouting, frequently singing along) complements
the performance on stage to form the whole of the experience of rock
music.
Rock concerts need physical and vocal audience participation for the
musical experience to be complete, satisfying, and true; Beavis and
Butt-head exemplify how such participation extends to private as well
as public spaces. Indeed, a crucial part of the critical process of rock
fans consists of experiencing the music in a collective context, and
Beavis and Butt-head reflect this collective trait in their constant reli-
ance on one another to confirm and reinforce their critical observa-
tions. While Butt-head may initiate comments on a video, he needs
Beavis's response in order to develop his argument. Theirs may be a
truly dysfunctional, chaotic dialogue-but dialogue is essential to
their interaction with the music.
Adorno and Horkheimer also speculated that the constant flow of
facts and of novelty in the products of the culture industry precludes
the possibility of reflection on the part of the consumer.17 While this
pessimistic perspective is predicated on the need for temporal and
critical distance in order for reflection to be possible, Beavis and Butt-
head do not consider interpretation a separate endeavor requiring
"critical distance": they are constantly in the process of interpreting
everything they experience. Their style of criticism is based not on
separation from and reflection on the object to be addressed, but rath-
er on immersion in and identification with the object-a pre-Oedipal
or de-Oedipalized subject position to which we shall return shortly.
In this context, we should remember the importance of the inherent-
ly repetitive nature of MTV programming, where videos are shown
over and over again for a period of weeks (if not months).18 Fans of
MTV thus gain knowledge of a musical work through repetition and
rehearings at different times and in different contexts, rather than
through close, detached analysis. This is arguably true of the way
most listeners gain familiarity with popular music, which is general-
ly associated with repeated, often partial, and distracted hearings
through radio broadcasts, dance-club remixes, music videos, adver-
tisements, and the like. The iterative model of listening associated
with popular music permits familiarity through revisitation instead

of analysis and reflection, thereby enabling Beavis and Butt-head's

performative style of criticism-a style that requires familiarity with
the videos but rejects critical distance.
At first glance, Beavis and Butt-head appear to be poster children
for the pessimistic Jamesonian interpretation of postmodern culture.
Fredric Jameson warns that the "emergence of a new flatness or
depthlessness... [is] perhaps the supreme formal feature of all post-
modernisms." He decries a "waning of affect," and especially the in-
dividual's lack of self-consciousness about his increasing alienation,
and detects not history but "historicism" in what he sees as the play
of random stylistic allusion.19 But Jameson's negativity about post-
modern subject positions derives from the breakdown of his ideal of
a single, Oedipally fulfilled, self-defined, and stable subject. Beavis
and Butt-head appear to reject that subject position; much of the show
consists of the lampooning of (presumably Oedipally stable) adult
male characters, all of whom are portrayed as foolish and ineffectu-
al. The boys revel instead in behavior that embodies recent theories
of the "schizophrenic" de-Oedipalized or anti-Oedipal subject.
So what is a de-Oedipalized subject? French philosophers/critics
Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari have theorized that the Freudian
interpretation of desire as lack does not account for the development
of a new, markedly "postmodern" interpretative position that they
characterize as "schizophrenic."20 Under standard Freudian models
of Oedipal desire, according to Deleuze and Guattari, "the whole of
desiring-production is crushed, subjected to the demands of represen-
tation."21 While desiring-production itself is fluid and self-sufficient,
"it is fitted over the co-ordinates of Oedipus." But "desire does not
lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that
is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject."22 Oedipal
theories of desire have postulated a stable subject defining itself in
opposition to the desired object; in opposition, Deleuze and Guattari
suggest that the dynamic nature of desire is anoedipal or even anti-
Oedipal: there is no need for a stable subject of desire, since desire it-
self implies an unstable, shifting subject. A subject that can shed its
dependence on the models of oedipal desire can be considered de-
Oedipalized, and this is the type of subject Deleuze and Guattari see
as a potential result of postmodern cultural developments:
These men of desire-or do they not yet exist?-are like Zarathus-
tra. They know incredible sufferings, vertigos, and sicknesses.
They have their specters. They must reinvent each gesture. But
such a man produces himself as a free man, irresponsible, soli-
tary, and joyous, finally able to say and do something simple in
his own name, without asking permission; a desire lacking noth-

74 Dell'Antonio
ing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no

longer designates any ego whatever. He has simply ceased be-
ing afraid of being mad.23
While Deleuze and Guattari describe the "man of desire" as solitary,
this contradicts the dissolution of the ego that they also associate with
the image; indeed, the "men of desire" can perhaps be better concep-
tualized as a collective type than as a set of self-aware individuals-
and with this modification of the Deleuzian model, the resemblance
of Beavis and Butt-head to these "men of desire" seems remarkable.
Jean Baudrillard has further suggested that the new non-Oedipal
stance is part and parcel of televisual culture, which substitutes "the
Faustian, Promethean (perhaps Oedipal) period of consumption" with
"the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity,
feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of com-
munication."24 Once again, these are descriptions that seem closely to
fit the fluid, communal critical style adopted by Beavis and Butt-head.
Social theorists have also observed that in recent decades the ab-
sence of strong father figures, combined with an increasing and per-
haps indulgent maternal role, has frequently led teenagers away from
the traditional self-defining break from a well-defined authoritative
figure, and has instead fostered generalized rebellion against a "wide-
ly dispersed, elusive yet omnipresent Power."25Fred Pfeil has specu-
lated that the traditional Oedipal split serves primarily to reinforce
patriarchal authority:
The Oedipal break with the Mother, moreover, serves not to re-
solve this powerful ambiguity of good mommy/bad mommy,
inside and outside, but to allow the subject to take flight from it
into the Symbolic, where it will be repressed, only to reemerge
as the domination of nature and the subjugation of women.26
By rejecting (or in any case avoiding) the Oedipal break, the subject
forms itself along very different lines, tending to identify with the
phenomena it observes rather than defining itself in opposition to
them. And here once again it seems we are reading the description
of a Beavis & Butt-head episode:
The subject reimmersed in an essentially pre-Oedipal relationship
to the world appears more likely to swing from one pole of in-
ternality to another, from a rage at all that surrounds and threat-
ens it to a deliriously dispersed self-exaltation across the whole
terrain of hollowed-out signifiers.... It is clear that the increas-
ing number of de-Oedipalized middle-class male subjects..,. in
no way guarantees any decrease in their fear of and hostility to-
ward women. The relative closing off of the Oedipal escape route

often seems to have increased that hostility and fear, now that
the safety of domination and the flight to the Symbolic is no long-
er available.27
In their hyperactive hedonism and pointedly nasty misogyny, Beavis
and Butt-head appear to embody these de-Oedipalized "middle-class
male subjects" at their very worst. Yet despite the objectionableness
of this subject position, some critics have pointed out that the very
fact that traditional Oedipal hegemony is broken by these new, per-
haps most truly postmodern subjects (certainly many of these traits
are also those assigned by Jameson to postmodern sensibilities) indi-
cates the ability of subjects to break that hegemony, and the poten-
tial for fundamental change inherent in that break. As Kaplan points
out, "Far from the incoherent flow of images signaling a schizophrenic
failure of language, the young adult's refusal to enter the realm of
the symbolic could represent a healthy breaking of confining bound-
aries and dichotomies that were constructed originally to serve cer-
tain bourgeois ends at a particular historical moment."28 And in the
case of Beavis & Butt-head we can go further, because what the show
offers is intense lampooning of the results of Oedipal hegemony: not
a single adult male in the show is even remotely sympathetic.29 While
they do not offer a positive alternative, Beavis and Butt-head (unlike
the men who pretend to be their role models) are true to themselves.
And the boys are ultimately true to their music: they like stuff that
they can rock to, whether that be the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy"
from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (much appreciated by the boys, who
encounter it during their first Christmas special and remark that it
"sounds like Ozzy" [Osbourne]) or the latest Iron Maiden video. The
driving force behind their lives, the activity in which they engage for
fully half of each episode, is, as we are reminded time and time again,
listening and responding to music. As we have seen, the boys are not
passive consumers: they participate in the videos they watch, and
employ music from those videos to punctuate-indeed, to character-
ize-successful moments in their daily activity. Beavis and Butt-head
are constantly engaging with and commenting on what they feel to
be the most significant musical events of their culture.
In this way, the comparison with Schumann's critical personae Flo-
restan and Eusebius suggested in the title of this essay might be more
(disturbingly?) apt than we might initially have imagined. The breath-
less interchange between the characters Florestan, Eusebius, and Ju-
lius-in the course of the 1831 essay in the Allgemeine Musikalische
Zeitung (on Chopin's Opus 2 variations) in which Schumann's "Da-
vidites" first were introduced-depicts enthusiastic friends emoting
over a musical work, commenting upon it in nonlinear and sometimes
borderline incoherent phrases:

76 Dell'Antonio
Eusebius laid down a piece of music. We were not allowed to see

the title-page. I turned over the leaves vacantly; the veiled en-
joyment of music which one does not hear, has something magi-
cal in it.... But here it seemed as if eyes, strange to me, were
glancing up at me-flower eyes, basilisk eyes, peacock's eyes,
maiden's eyes; in many places it looked yet brighter-I thought
I saw Mozart's "La ci darem la mano" wound through a hundred
chords, Leporello seemed to wink at me, and Don Juan hurried
past in a white mantle. "Now play it," said Florestan. Eusebius
consented.... How our faces glowed, as we wondered, exclaim-
ing "that is something reasonable once more-Chopin-I never
heard of the name-who can he be?-in any case a genius-is
that not Zerlina's smile?-and Leporello-&c., &c."30
A number of the "aphorisms" that Schumann published as critical
pieces are set up as dialogues between the "Davidites," and emotional
interaction between two or more individuals forms an important part
of a number of Schumann's critical essays.31 In Schumann's commen-
taries, the most prominent examples of the burgeoning nineteenth-
century tradition of music criticism, there is often no critical distance
whatsoever: intensity and immersion are the driving force of these
essays.
Andrew Goodwin has observed that in its embodiment of an "aes-
thetic of intensity, vulgarity, and immediacy" MTV is a romantic-like
phenomenon; and intensity and immediacy are certainly traits shared
by the musical experiences of both Schumann's and Judge's charac-
ters, which could easily be characterized as "vulgar" (as opposed to
refined or elite) within their specific aesthetic frameworks.32 And the
romantic immediacy of art, the breakdown of-as Jameson puts it-
the "semi-autonomy" of art with respect to everyday activity, is cer-
tainly a trait shared by the two sets of critical personae.33
While the ultimate effect and aesthetic message of Beavis and Butt-
head's nihilism are unclear (and we will return to this point a little
later), certainly the boys participate in-and thus ridicule-a num-
ber of the "romantic" constructions of rock analyzed by Goodwin. In
the first place, the posturing motif of the rock-and-roll "hard-living
duo," mercilessly exploited by a number of bands (especially heavy
metal ones) in the 1970s and '80s, reflects its bourgeois-wannabe-
hoodlum swagger in the boys' pretensions of toughness.34 Related are
what Goodwin refers to as the "fantasy of street knowledge" and the
"invocation of black pleasure as a sign of authenticity"-an appro-
priation that Beavis and Butt-head, with their buffoonish imitations
of "gangsta" behavior and their panting enjoyment of erotic raps such
as Sir Mix-a-lot's BABYGOTBACK,reduce to its most blatant level of

parody.35 Goodwin has argued that such "romantic" paradigms con-

tradict those who have wanted to see in MTV the embodiment of a
postmodern aesthetic; yet such criticism depends on a limited (Jame-
sonian/Baudrillardian) definition of postmodernism-admittedly the
definition employed by the critics Goodwin rightly chastises for their
misunderstanding of MTV.36If much of modernism's critical distanc-
ing can be seen as a reaction to late-romanticist slippage in subjec-
tive control, then romanticism and postmodernism are by no means
incompatible in their acceptance of unstable subjectivity.
Indeed, there is merit in seeing both Schumann's and Judge's char-
acters as representatives of an aesthetic that does not participate in a
specific notion of subjectivity and artistic independence, first argued
by Baudelaire, which has been defined as "modernist": the notion that
art is "a critical mirror, showing the irreconcilable nature of the aes-
thetic and the social worlds."37 If Florestan and Eusebius are represen-
tatives of a premodernist aesthetic of continuity between the aesthet-
ic and social spheres, Beavis and Butt-head seem to represent a parallel
approach that, reacting in opposition to modernist models, could eas-
ily be seen as "postmodernist." If we can posit critical distance as a
modernist trope, the lack of critical distance (and of a stable, controlled
subject) can be seen as nonmodernist (whether pre- or post-) and pro-
vides an interesting contextualization of the historically determined
nature of an interpretative ideal based on critical distance.
Through the absurdity of their constant, fruitless search for fulfill-
ment of their hypersexed and hyperacquisitive needs, musical and
otherwise, Beavis and Butt-head hint at a message delivered explic-
itly by the Frankfurt critics and their followers: the absurdity of a
culture industry that suggests that all of a consumer's needs are ca-
pable of fulfillment through consumption of the goods the culture
industry provides.38 But instead of offering a practical escape from
those absurdities (or scorning them, as have critics of late-capitalist
consumption models), Beavis and Butt-head revel in absurdity and
excess, and encourage us to do likewise. Indeed, Beavis and Butt-head
are shown to believe in the power of their limitless desire: as Deleuze
and Guattari speculate, "Desiring-production produces the real,
and.., desire has little to do with fantasy and dream."39Beavis and
Butt-head are perfect desiring machines who construct their own re-
ality through their desiring processes-a reality that the show por-
trays as no more twisted than the reality of the "serious" adult char-
acters who surround the boys. Beavis and Butt-head also live in a
world that is ideal for their critical processes-a world in which there
are countless television channels showing music videos (the boys
change the channel when there is a video they do not like, and there
is another video on the new channel). The boys are able to display

78 Dell'Antonio
joyous critical energy despite their inability to fulfill their desires-

or, perhaps, exactly because their desires in the video-watching seg-
ments are constantly churning, constantly searching, constantly un-
fulfilled.
Is it necessary to employ detachment or "critical distance" in order

to assess a musical text, or is a paradigm of immersion and identifi-
cation-akin to that chosen by Schumann in his pioneering critical
writing-perhaps well suited to critical reception of music video, and
perhaps other musical styles that have rejected the ideals of twenti-
eth-century modernism? Here we can return yet again to Adorno and
Horkheimer, who in their dire warnings about the hegemonic perva-
siveness of the culture industry see a fleeting possibility for true re-
sistance:
Amusement, if released from every restraint, would not only be
the antithesis of art but its extreme role.... In some revue films,
and especially in the grotesque and the funnies, the possibility
of this negation does glimmer for a few moments. But of course
it cannot happen. Pure amusement in its consequence, relaxed
self-surrender to all kinds of associations and happy nonsense,
is cut short by the amusement on the market.... Ethics and taste
cut short unrestrained amusement as "naive"--naivet6 is thought
to be as bad as intellectualism.... The consequence is that the
nonsensical at the bottom disappears as utterly as the sense in
works of art at the top.40
It seems paradoxical to claim Beavis and Butt-head as followers of
the Frankfurt School, but "relaxed self-surrender to all kinds of asso-
ciations and happy nonsense" is an exact description of their inter-
action with MTV videos-and, indeed, all that surrounds them. To
be sure, their sordid character does not permit their critical behavior
to be seen as entirely normative; and admittedly their position with-
in the main body of MTV programming, not to mention the immense
financial success for the network, certainly indicates that MTV does
not feel threatened by the kind of ridicule offered by the duo. Robin
Roberts suggests that "MTV is practicing what Marcuse calls 'repres-
sive tolerance,' the process by which an institution incorporates crit-
icism into its system, thus weakening and ridiculing its opposition."41
Andrew Goodwin has insightfully unpacked the careful balance
forged by MTV between market hegemony and countercultural atti-
tude, providing useful warnings about its role in
[restructuring] the subject-as-citizen (the public service model)
along the lines of the subject-as-consumer (the free market mod-

el).... [A]dvertising sells more than individual commodities and

services-it also promotes consumerism itself, and may consti-
tute an ideology to the extent that it implies marketplace solu-
tions to all social problems.42
A critique of music-video culture through Beavis & Butt-head poses no
serious challenge to the cultural and economic viability of MTV; in-
deed, it is through this critique that MTV can maintain an appearance
of self-critical "hipness" (we shall return to this point below). Yet
MTV's fiction of critical transgression through the boys' behavior in-
dicates that such transgression (at least at the symbolic level) is not
only possible, but indeed part and parcel of music video viewing.
Fredric Jameson has confronted the thoroughly pessimistic Frank-
furt School position on the effects of the culture industry, arguing that
mass-culture phenomena (such as MTV) fulfill a dual role: they not
only provide a structured, economically targeted set of objects of de-
sire, but also open a space for the public's awareness of its unfulfilled
desire. While the former function is designed to fulfill the latter, the
creators of mass culture have much control over the latter and little
control over the former. Thus, Jameson observes, we can grasp mass
culture "not as empty distraction or as 'mere' false consciousness, but
rather as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and
fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass
cultural text in order subsequently to be 'managed' or repressed."43
As Jameson points out, the repression of such fantasies is by no means
a certainty: their very presence can offer a potential for disruption of
the status quo. The social-and aesthetic-anxieties brought into cir-
culation by the boys' interaction with the music videos through their
communal critical stance may thus represent (to some degree at least)
a successful embodiment of Adorno's hoped-for resistance to the cul-
ture industry.
And this form of resistance is not unique to Beavis & Butt-head.Since
early 1995, MTV has sporadically been airing a program it calls Yack
Live. Whether the show draws its inspiration from Beavis & Butt-head
or is merely a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon of which
the boys are but a mirror, the show is predicated entirely on an aim-
less "happy nonsense" format of commentary similar to that practiced
by the boys.44 YackLive depends on the existence of internet chat lines,
which allow for immediate group communication: people connected
to the chat room through their computer can type in messages, and
their words instantly appear on the screen of all other people con-
nected to the chat room. Such a medium encourages overlapping con-
versations and free-form interaction among many people at once.
During appointed times, MTV shows a series of videos and simul-

80 Dell'Antonio
taneously monitors specific chat rooms: MTV viewers who wish to

participate in the YackLive video chat connect to those chat rooms and
comment on the videos that are being shown at that time. MTV then
edits out any comments it finds obscene or otherwise offensive and
displays the edited comments on the TV screen beneath the video.
There is a small time lag, but the comments appear to be displayed
within a few seconds of when they are made.45
Clearly the MTV viewers who participate in YackLive enjoy com-
menting on and interacting with the videos in a way similar to Bea-
vis and Butt-head's interaction during the on-the-couch segments. Not
surprisingly, the more one watches the YackLive exchanges, the clearer
it becomes that a large number of apparently trivial comments are not
made randomly, but rather follow a very complex web of associations,
which develop through the interaction of the chatting group; just as
in Beavis & Butt-head, this is not meaningless pastiche, but rather a
very rarefied system of group signification. Such signification does
not match the level of purposeful insight into a specific work attempt-
ed by "standard" (that is, modernist) music criticism, nor does it seek
to: but it is "critical" in its own right because it results in the produc-
tion of meaning surrounding and relating to the work at hand.46 And
while MTV has some control over the content of the exchanges on
the TV screen (not only through its possible censorship of offending
messages, but also by its choice of what videos are shown, and for
how long the chat-room comments are broadcast), it is to MTV's ad-
vantage to appear to censor as little as possible, in order to reveal the
"authentic" exchanges between the participants. Furthermore, MTV
has little or no control over the (public) exchanges in the chat room
itself; having unleashed the circumstances for collective critical dis-
course, MTV can only (gingerly) decide how much censorship it is
willing to exercise on the results.47
To summarize: Beavis and Butt-head's criticism is performative, not
reflective. There is a continuum between the boys' everyday life and
their criticism: their constant intermingling of pointed critique with
banal comments and crude asides indicates that they consider their
interaction with music videos as natural and necessary as their other
favorite activities, eating nachos or pinching a loaf. But what they do
is unmistakably criticism, because only a portion of any given video
is shown during the boys' commentary: this use of excerpts rather
than entire pieces assumes familiarity of the listeners/viewers with
the video, and in any case foregrounds not the "text" (that is, the vid-
eo) but the discourse around it. Or more precisely, it gives that dis-
course (the boys' critical process) equal standing with the video it-
self, and brings to our attention the process whereby we as listeners/
viewers start to attribute meaning to the music and visual images that

make up a music video.48 Not only is the boys' behavior certainly crit-
icism, it is arguably a contagious sort of criticism: by portraying two
morons as capable of engaging critically (rather than passively) with
the music that surrounds them, the show may well encourage its
viewers to think they are (at least) equally capable of such engage-
ment. In this regard the boys can be seen as providing a constructive
model, though a negative/reverse one, for critical engagement.
The boys show no critical detachment, but rather constantly grap-
ple with the music and images, making no distinction in their actions
and words between intellectual and physical engagement, between
criticizing and participating in the video. Their interpretive approach
indicates that, whether by inability or by choice, they have not made
an Oedipal break: they do not distinguish between their internal emo-
tions and those they experience through the videos. Beavis and Butt-
head are too slippery for their emotions to be reliably controlled by
the videos, and are thus able to respond critically; and their ability
to step outside a video and look in derives not from distance but rath-
er from constant movement. Their criticism depends precisely on
maintaining an unstable, erratic subject position rather than a stable,
well-defined one.
In opposition to the modernist ideal (following Baudelaire) of in-
dividual participation in an artistic process that is detached from the
ordinariness of collective endeavor, and mirroring the collective ar-
tistic sensibility offered by Schumann through Florestan and Eusebius,
Beavis and Butt-head may provide us a model of occasionally in-
spired, group-critical participation in art-where the contributions of
a single great artist or critic matter less than the collective interaction
of a mediocre group, producing sporadic sparks of insight. This model
resonates with the critical process evident in the YackLive video ex-
changes; it could even be seen as an ideal model for critical inquiry
that is truly postmodern in its rejection of a (specifically modernist)
stable subject-position. Following this line we could perhaps (and
paradoxically) even see Beavis and Butt-head as representatives of
Antonio Gramsci's ideal of the "organic intellectual" for the MTV
generation.49 The fact that the boys' perspective is created by a group
of writers rather than a single individual helps them to achieve the
multiple personality, schizophrenic perspective that has been seen as
typical of the postmodern subject.50s
The boys' behavior toward the videos and the videos' occasional
"responses" reinforce the participatory nature of MTV viewership.
This, of course, plays into MTV's wish to appear to duplicate the in-
tensity and "authenticity" of the rock-concert experience; as Good-
win points out, this allows MTV to be "simultaneously involved in
the incorporation and the promotion of dissent," and to maintain its

82 Dell'Antonio
careful balance between market hegemony and countercultural atti-

tude.51 In pursuing these parallel goals, Goodwin has suggested that
MTV has two discourses: one consisting primarily of nihilistic pas-
tiche (thus, in his assessment, postmodern), the other parody-based
and vaguely liberal (and thus more closely linked to modernist ide-
als).52 The intersection of these discourses in Beavis & Butt-head sug-
gests that they may be two sides of the same coin. While the boys'
reactions to the videos at first appear to consist of a free flow of ni-
hilistic signifiers, this apparent pastiche often coalesces into clear and
pointed use of parody and satire (and precisely "vaguely liberal" par-
ody, since most of the targets of ridicule are conservative "establish-
ment" figures).
Goodwin is correct in rejecting "the analysis of music television as
a postmodern text"53and in observing that the concept of pastiche is
of limited use in understanding MTV's message. Indeed, the parody
and satire that drives Beavis & Butt-head reinforces Goodwin's con-
tention that "parody and satire, unlike pastiche, clearly articulate a
point of view"-though the point of view of the postmodern subject
as exemplified by Beavis & Butt-head is not as stable or easily iden-
tified as that offered by a detached modernist subject.54Still, I would
argue that MTV certainly embraces some nonmodernist attitudes, in-
cluding the potential for diffuse collective critical discourse as exem-
plified by Beavis & Butt-head and especially Yack Live. I would sug-
gest Hal Foster's useful distinction between a "postmodernism of
reaction" and a "postmodernism of resistance," the latter of which is
concerned with "a critical deconstruction of tradition... [seeking to]
question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than con-
ceal social and political affiliations."55 Within this definition, MTV al-
lows the boys (and the Yackers) to engage in specific kinds of resis-
tance, under the assumption that they do not undermine the basic
economic premises of MTV; this is well in keeping with Goodwin's
assessment of one of MTV's principal discourses as "vaguely liber-
al" in its championing of progressive social causes. And as Robert
Walser Points out in his discussion of Prince's symbolic transgres-
sions, "to engage, disrupt, and rearticulate.. . affective engagements
can be as consequential as any more overt struggle over signification
or ideology."56 By "constantly rework[ing] themes (work, school, au-
thority, romance, poverty and so on) that are deeply implicated in the
question of how meaning serves (or resists) power," the critical pro-
cesses exemplified on MTV may not constitute "a radical break with
the social processes of meaning production," but do enlist nonmod-
ernist (and arguably postmodernist, according to definitions suggest-
ed above) paradigms in the service of their approach."7
Indeed, while MTV certainly manufactures the "authenticity" of

video-watching participation to a large extent, it cannot fully control

that participation, especially in circumstances such as Yack Live-a
program that illustrates how a critical approach that combines "hap-
py nonsense" and pointed commentary is a phenomenon compris-
ing certainly a much broader scope than two cartoon boys on a couch.
It would thus appear that Adorno and Horkheimer's assessment of
the possibilities for the "grotesque funnies" to effect critical change-
for better or for worse-may have been too pessimistic.
Beavis and Butt-head are quite possibly the most repulsive charac-
ters ever to inhabit prime-time television-but they are certainly the
most engaged musical-consumer images in pop culture today. As
such, they deserve to be taken seriously; and if we can overcome our
revulsion at the supreme grossness of their behavior-or, better yet,
if we can tune in to their over-the-top crassness and accept it as a
reflection of a legitimate collective interpretative discourse-we will
understand how their role as music critics illustrates and arguably
promotes a postmodern, MTV-based twist on informed musical con-
sumption.
NOTES
I would like to thank Rob Walser and the anonymous reviewers for American Music
for their invaluable suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.
1. Born in 1963, Judge received a degree in physics and worked briefly in the aero-
space industry before moving to Austin, Texas, to pursue a career in popular music.
He claims to have stumbled on animation almost by accident. Initially the animator for
the show, Judge gradually turned the animation process over to a Korean firm, Rough
Draft Studios. Judge has been the voice of both Beavis and Butt-head, as well as pro-
viding the voices for a number of other major characters in the show. See Charles M.
Young, "Behind Beavis and Butt-head: The Stercoraceous Vision of Mike Judge," Roll-
ing Stone 663 (March 24, 1993): 48-50, 87; and Young, "Meet the Beavis: The Last Word
from America's Phenomenal Pop Combo," Rolling Stone 678 (Aug. 19, 1994): 39-40.
2. The boy's family did not have access to cable television, and the child had been
previously involved in pyromaniacal incidents. For information on and reactions to
the incident, as well as a wealth of other information on the boys and Judge, see Chris
Wallner's "Beavis and Butt-head 'Frequently Assed [sic] Questions'" web page (Ver-
sion 5.0-2/21/96), at the URL http://www.thewebdepot.com/cwallner/faq/
faqtop.htm.
3. A disclaimer stating that Beavis and Butt-head are not role models was also add-
ed to the opening credits.
4. Cover of Rolling Stone 678 (March 24, 1994); Young, "Meet the Beavis," 39.
5. See Young, "Meet the Beavis," 39; and Deborah Russell, "Beavis, Butt-head a Boon
for Bands," Billboard (Sept. 4, 1993): 90. For an extended discussion of the effect of the
show on the success of Babes in Toyland, see Robin Roberts, LadiesFirst: Womenin Music
Videos (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 96-97.
6. See Dan Pawlak, "Beavis and Butt-head: The Episode Guide" at the URL http://
www.mcs.net/~ -batcave/public_html/bnbguide.html.

84 Dell'Antonio
7. Following the release of the movie Beavis & Butt-head Do America, a new show for-
mat was introduced in January 1997, which featured three story segments per half-
hour show, each with only one video; the videos were all recycled from previous epi-
sodes. While the story segments remained roughly the same length, the use of three
rather than six video segments allowed an additional five or so minutes per half hour
(!) for commercial breaks. This format met with much less approval; in the summer of
1997 it was announced that Mike Judge would no longer be writing new episodes for
the show, and the last episode aired on Nov. 28, 1997. It is unclear whether this can-
cellation resulted from the reduced popularity of the show or Judge's decision to pur-
sue other venues; perhaps significantly, despite the title of the final episode ("Beavis
and Butt-head Are Dead"), MTV and/or Judge decided to maintain the boys alive,
perhaps looking forward to a second feature film. See the episode guide cited above
and the brief article by Michael Burgi in Mediaweek 7, no. 30 (Aug. 4, 1997): 14.
8. Occasionally the titles or content of the featured videos are loosely connected with
the story line; for example, the 1993 double episode "Way Down Mexico Way," in which
the boys hitchhike to Mexico, featured the following videos (among others): MEXICAN
RADIO (Wall of Voodoo),
PSYCHO HOLIDAY (Pantera), RICO SUAVE (Gerardo), and ADIOS,
MEXICO(Texas Tornados). Another example: in the 1993 episode "Scared Straight," the
boys are taken on a field trip to the local jail, and one of the videos is Judas Priest's
BREAKING THELAW.Titles of video clips are given in small capitals following the con-
vention established by Andrew Goodwin (see his Dancing in the Distraction Factory
[Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], xiii-xiv).
9. This fragmented structure is very much in keeping with the ever-changing pace
typical of MTV programming.
10. This odd displacement is reinforced by the fact that the video is not seen through
the frame of the boys' own TV but full-screen, on the viewer's TV: during the story
sections of the episode we often see the TV image from the boys' perspective (the boys
watch TV all the time, even when they are not watching videos), but always at least
partially framed by the TV monitor itself. Though the location of the viewer during
the video-watching segments initially seems to be straightforward-alternately next
to the boys and "inside" their TV-the displacement of the TV set to the viewer's (rath-
er than the boys') room makes this a most interesting construction of space, and fur-
ther reinforces the link between the viewer and the boys as a critical collective.
11. The boys' singing is almost always wordless imitation of guitar riffs, and most
frequently a barely pitched evocation of a heavy metal rhythmic chorus phrase (this is
not always an identifiable phrase, though the chorus of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man"
occasionally surfaces). This "dah dah dah" is accompanied by stylized "air guitar" or
other gestures associated with performers' and fans' ecstatic movements in heavy metal
bands' performance videos.
12. The boys are alluding to the show MTV Unplugged, in which bands that tradi-
tionally play amplified instruments are shown playing a set of songs with acoustic in-
struments.
13. The boys are talking about Salt 'n Pepa's video SHOOP,from the episode "They're
Coming to Take Me Away, Huh Huh," ? MTV 1994. The allusion may be a parody of
the concept of interactivity with its audience (through telephone polls and other "live"
request events) that MTV was exploring in the early 1990s. This focus on interactivity
has been redoubled with the advent of chat lines and the spread of World Wide Web-
based communication, which MTV has entered with a vengeance in the second half of
the 1990s; see the discussion of YackLive.
14. The video is from the episode "Date Bait," ? MTV 1994.
15. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception," in The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), 31.

16. E. Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and
Consumer Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 4, 12.
17. Adorno and Horkheimer, "Culture Industry," 34.
18. Interestingly, programming of Beavis & Butt-headepisodes during the show's hey-
day in 1994-96 worked in much the same way as programming for MTV's music vid-
eos. There were two episodes in each daily show, four episodes in the back-to-back
half-hours on weekend nights. The overwhelming majority of episodes were repeats,
and several months went by between the debut of new episodes: for instance, there
were no new episodes between March and September 1996, despite the show airing
10+ episodes a week every week. Most of the repeated episodes were from the sea-
sons spanning 1994 and 1995, though there was an occasional reprise of an episode
from the first year, usually with Beavis's pyromania (indeed, all references to fire) ei-
ther toned down or entirely eliminated. Repeat episodes were presented not sequen-
tially but in various combinations, usually with episodes appearing roughly every other
week, some more frequently than others. When new episodes were introduced, repe-
tition was built into the introduction sequence/rotation: the first night might feature
new episode A and new episode B, the second night new episodes B and C, the third
night C and D, and so on. This reliance on repetition was especially remarkable in the
light of the popularity of the show; it would seem that fans did not resent (perhaps
even relished) the fact that they had several opportunities fully to absorb Beavis and
Butt-head's critical standpoint on a video or their satirical unpacking of "normalcy."
19. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," in
Postmodernism:A Reader,ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993), 68-74 passim.
20. For an excellent reading of Deleuze and Guattari in the context of late twenti-
eth-century popular music, see Robert Walser, "Prince as Queer Poststructuralist," Pop-
ular Music and Society 18, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 79-89. Walser suggests that in his "queer-
ing" of traditional pop subject positions, Prince may be seeking "a sort of body without
organs that can escape Oedipal structures" (85).
21. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia,trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Zone (New York: Viking, 1977), 54.
22. Ibid., 26.
23. Ibid., 131.
24. Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays
on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 127.
25. Fred Pfeil, "Postmodernism as a 'Structure of Feeling,'" in Marxism and the In-
terpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1988), 392.
26. Ibid., 395.
27. Ibid., 396-97.
28. Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock, 148.
29. For an exploration of the potentially feminist subtext of much of the humor in
the show, see Roberts, Ladies First, chap. 4 ("'Alternative Nation': Alternative Music,
Feminism, and Beavis & Butt-head"), especially 98-99.
30. Fanny Raymond Ritter, ed. and trans., Music and Musicians: Essays and Criticisms
by Robert Schumann (London: Reeves, 1891), 4-7.
31. For examples of the former, see ibid., 59ff.; for the latter, see ibid., 325ff.
32. Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, xviii.
33. Jameson, "Postmodernism," 86.
34. Many of the episodes involve Beavis and Butt-head frantically and fruitlessly try-
ing to impress a local hoodlum so that they might be allowed to join his gang. The
fact that they invariably end up being exploited and ridiculed (and ultimately getting

86 Dell'Antonio
their asses kicked) never deters the boys from their aspirations to "cool" organized
violence. The stupidity and buffoonery of these attempts makes for some of the most
biting satire of the show.
35. Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 116.
36. Ibid., 45-48.
37. Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity: An Incomplete Project," in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed.
Foster, 10.
38. See Adorno and Horkheimer, "Culture Industry," 40; and also Kaplan, Rocking
Around the Clock, 12.
39. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 380-81.
40. Adorno and Horkheimer, "Culture Industry," 40-41.
41. Roberts, Ladies First, 93.
43. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979):
130-48.
44. YackLive is not a regularly scheduled show like Beavis & Butt-head or a number
of other video-focused shows. Instead, it is a collaboration with internet service pro-
vider America Online (though non-AOL members can also gain access to some chat
events) to add participatory features to various shows on an occasional basis. Not all
YackLive events are video commentaries; the discussion in this essay is based on a half-
dozen YackLive video-related episodes that the author viewed in the spring of 1996, a
time when there were a number of YackLive events connected to MTV video shows.
Since that time, live MTV-sponsored interaction on videos has become sporadic.
45. While I videotaped a couple of short YackLive interactions in early 1996 for the
purposes of this project, the complexities of copyright attribution and authorization
(as well as the length of the exchanges) make it impractical for those interactions to be
transcribed here.
46. Again, owing to the sporadic nature of the YackLive events, a more specific anal-
ysis and more substantive conclusions about the nature and potential of chat-based,
collective critical processes must await further study.
47. This may be another reason why YackLive events are sporadic, and seem to have
mostly ceased to be associated with music videos (as of the spring of 1999).
48. For an insightful conceptual foray into this process, see Goodwin, "A Musicolo-
gy of the Image," chap. 3 of Dancing in the Distraction Factory.
49. I will be pursuing this line of thought in an essay entitled "Collective Listening:
Postmodern Critical Processes and MTV," in a collection of essays I am editing tenta-
tively entitled Beyond Structural Listening: Postmodern Modes of Hearing (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, forthcoming).
50. Between the two of them, Beavis and Butt-head simultaneously share less than
one subject (the story lines frequently underscore to the viewer that they could not
function independently) and at least as many subjects as the writers on the show's staff.
52. Ibid., 62.
53. Ibid., 154.
54. Ibid., 60.
55. Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic, xii.
56. Walser, "Prince as Queer Poststructuralist," 87.


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Florestan and Butt-head: A Glimpse into Postmodern Music Criticism

Author(s): Andrew Dell'Antonio

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Florestan and Butt-head:

Much reviled in the press as avatars of teenage nihilism, banished

Dell'Antonio is Assistant Professorof Musicology at the University of Texas

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Beavis and Butt-head first made their appearance in a couple of brief

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I Story • Video Commercial

Figure 1. Comparisonof Segment Lengths in Four Episodes

sist of a regular alternation of narrative and video segments, with a

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fighting, or reacting to particularly steamy images; the soundtrack is

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Beavis: I think there's a problemwith this video. I think it's highly

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sponses to the video foreground the absurdity of Jett's question and

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of analysis and reflection, thereby enabling Beavis and Butt-head's

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ing, a flux that overcomes barriers and codes, a name that no

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Eusebius laid down a piece of music. We were not allowed to see

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parody.35 Goodwin has argued that such "romantic" paradigms con-

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joyous critical energy despite their inability to fulfill their desires-

Is it necessary to employ detachment or "critical distance" in order

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el).... [A]dvertising sells more than individual commodities and

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taneously monitors specific chat rooms: MTV viewers who wish to

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careful balance between market hegemony and countercultural atti-

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video-watching participation to a large extent, it cannot fully control

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This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 17:24:26 PM

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 17:24:26 PM

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Fri, 12 Dec 2014 17:24:26 PM

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