Abstract
:The cable television network VH1 uses 1980s popular music—heavy metal music, specifically—to target audiences from across generations. Whereas older viewers who are familiar with heavy metal music are courted with the many music videos, interviews, and documentary programs that chronicle the genre's performers across VH1's content, younger viewers are courted with tongue-in-cheek modes of address that play on the stylistic and gendered excesses of heavy metal. Moreover, VH1 rearticulates for largely female audiences a genre most closely identified with young men, unsettling some of the subject–object dynamics at work in their repackaging of 1980s popular music. Reading the reality program Rock of Love amidst other elements of VH1's 1980s-themed programming, the author demonstrates how television recalls its own history to court ever-more viewers. In doing this, the network reifies some “old” gender politics in “new” texts. At the same time, the network issues some rejoinders and revisions to these politics. Television's narration of history is thus fragmented and contradictory, offering multiple points of entry to assorted viewerships.
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