David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video: 1984-2016

by Lisa Perrott, Carol Vernallis (Editor), Lisa Perrott (Editor), Holly Rogers (Editor)

Overview

A follow-up to David Bowie and the Art of Music Video, David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video focuses on the ways in which Bowie expanded music video's form and function within the context of media convergence, transmedia and remediation.

By 1984, Bowie was riding the wave of MTV. Staying just ahead of the cusp of the wave, he could see MTV's demise on the horizon. The possibilities for transmedia artists were changing due to converging media, participatory culture and the increasingly creative participatory role of fans. A vanguard of transmedia artistry, Bowie acted in films and collaborated with directors who were also transmedia artists, strategies that helped him to spread his 'brand' even further across media.

Examining Bowie's expansion of music video across artforms, platforms and mediums, this book shows how his music videos blurred genre boundaries and generated new ways of engaging with identity, philosophy, illness, death, art, mythology and archetype. Drawing upon the concepts of media convergence, transmedia, intertextuality, hauntology, lateness, dispersed authorship and participatory cultures, this book offers primary and secondary interviews with music video directors as well as close analyses of several music videos and illuminates convergences across film, television, dance, theatre, literature and philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501393457
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/30/2026
Series:	New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis, of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media, and the collected volume Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Lisa is also co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom. Her interests include music video, animation, documentary and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between sound, music and visual media. Lisa is currently completing her second Bloomsbury monograph David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video (1984-2016 and Beyond).

Carol Vernallis is Affiliated Researcher in Music at Stanford University and Visiting Professor of Music at University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Experiencing Music Video (2004) and Unruly Media (2013). She is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (2013), and on the editorial board of The Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Lisa Perrott is Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is co-editor, with Holly Rogers and Carol Vernallis, of the Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media, and the collected volume Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Lisa is also co-editor, with Ana Cristina Mendes, of David Bowie and Transmedia Stardom. Her interests include music video, animation, documentary and transmedia, with an emphasis on the relations between sound, music and visual media. Lisa is currently completing her second Bloomsbury monograph David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video (1984-2016 and Beyond).

Holly Rogers is Professor of Music and Director of Research at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, where she runs the MA Music (Audiovisual Cultures). She is author of Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise of Art-Music (2013) and co-author of Studying Twentieth-Century Music in the West (2022). She has edited several books on audiovisual culture, including Music and Sound in Documentary Film (2014), The Music and Sound of Experimental Film (2017), Transmedia Directors: Artistry, Industry and New Audiovisual Aesthetics (Bloomsbury, 2019), Cybermedia (Bloomsbury, 2021), YouTube and Music (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Remediating Sound (Bloomsbury, 2023). Holly is one of the founding editors for Bloomsbury book series New Approaches to Sound, Music and Media and the Goldsmiths journal “Sonic Scope: New Approaches to Audiovisual Culture”..

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Expanding Music Video
2. Blurring Boundaries: Transmedia Storytelling
3. Dancing Intertexts: Converging Mediums
4. Puppetry and Persona
5. Lateness, Hauntology and a 'Total Work of Art'
6. Re-animating Bowie