No Soap, Radio (or T.V., as the Case May Be)

733. STOOGES, "T.V. Eye"
Produced by Don Gallucci; written by the Stooges
1970 Did not make pop charts

Metaphors again, this time of the private kind.

Do you really need to know what someone is saying in order to know what they're saying? Philosophers and semioticians have struggled with this question for ages. Some would settle it by deferring to the debates of Austin and Searle's speech-act theory. Others would affirm that Fernand de Saussure wrestled this one to the ground and won on points almost a century ago.

I, on the other hand, prefer a more pragmatic approach. For me, the acid test for that particular conundrum is this particular Stooges track. For years, I thought that the "T.V." here was a reference to closed-circuit surveillance. I had assumed it meant something like "she's watching me closely," the flipside (if you will) of Luscious Jackson's "Naked Eye" twenty-five years down the road.

But no. As I discovered when reading Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's fascinating Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, during the late 1960s and early 1970s "T.V." was apparently a specific piece of Ann Arbor music scene slang. It referred to a "Vibe" allegedly emanating from . . . well, from a specific part of a woman's anatomy as designated by a term I was not brought up to use. In any case, there were no monitors, cameras, or cables involved. Apparently, the technology was wireless, even back during the Nixon administration.

So it turns out, I didn't know what Iggy was saying. But the thing is, I did. The instruments told me what was going on in this scene even if the lyrics that were supposed to describe it were willfully obfuscatory. Great songs don't just signify on a single, verbal level, which is why English professors shouldn't be let within a mile of rock and roll. As D. H. Lawrence should have said, trust the band, not the frontman.