Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media

by Gina Arnold (Editor), Daniel Cookney (Editor), Kirsty Fairclough (Editor), Michael Goddard (Editor)

Overview

This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of “music television”.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501313912
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	08/10/2017
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College, USA. As a former rock critic for Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, she was an early advocate of the genre now known as grunge. She is the author of Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, (2003), Punk In the Present Tense, (1997) and Exile In Guyville, (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as Rock Crowds And Power. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.

Daniel Cookney is Senior Lecturer in Creative Digital Design at School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His writing includes 'Sshhh' in Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (Continuum, 2012) plus the co-edited Extremity and Excess (2012). He also writes for a selection of print and online publications on subjects such as contemporary street art, the branding of cultural institutions and disco whilst maintaining a professional practice producing graphic design for music industry clients including Warner Brothers, Stiff Records, BMG and ZTT.

Kirsty Fairclough is Professor of Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (2013), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury, 2016), Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (2020), Prince and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2020), and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé: Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury). She is the curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film and In Her View: Women Documentary Filmmakers film seasons at HOME, Manchester and Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival.

Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK. He has published widely on international cinema, audiovisual culture, and media theory. He recently published a book, Impossible Cartographies on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music culminating in co-editing two books on noise, Reverberations and Resonances. Most recently, his research focuses on contemporary audiovisual popular culture and urban space. He is currently a Special Visiting Researcher, working with a team of researchers at Unisinos, Brazil on the project, “Cities, Creative Industries and Popular Music Scenes.”

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: The Persistence of the Music Video
Histories and Pre Histories
Introduction: Gina Arnold
1. Visual Pleasure and Music Video - Sunil Manghani, University of Southampton, UK
2. From Broadway to Phineas and Ferb: The Rise of Music(al Comedy) Videos - Michael Saffle, Virginia Tech, USA
3. 'The Message' is the Medium: Aesthetics, Ideology, and the Hip Hop Music Video- Greg de Cuir Jr., Independent Scholar
4. The Boy Keeps Swinging: David Bowie, Music Video, and the Star Image - Julie Lobalzo Wright, University of Warwick, UK
5. Substance and Technique: New Order, the Music Video, and the 1980s - Andrew Burke, University of Winnipeg, Canada
Gender and Sexual Representation
Introduction: Kirsty Fairclough
6. Liquidities for the Essex Man: The Monetarist Eroticism of British Yacht Pop- Benjamin Halligan, University of Wolverhampton, UK
7. Completing the Mystery of her Flesh: Love, Eroticism and Identity in Bjork's Videos – Vera Brozzoni, Independent Scholar
8. Soundtrack Self: FKA Twigs, Self Documentation and Feminist Authenticity in the Music Video – Kirsty Fairclough, University of Salford, UK
9. Anal Terrorism: Nicki Minaj's 'Anaconda' video - Fabricio Silveira, Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos, Brazil
The Art of the Music Video
Introduction: Michael Goddard
10. Moving the Music: Dance, Action and Embodied Identities in Music Video - Sarie Mairs Slee, University of Salford, UK
11. Total State Machine and Gesamtkunstwerk: The Audiovisual Poetics of First and Second Generation Industrial Music Video - Michael Goddard, University of Westminster, UK
12. One. World: Self-Effacement of H.P. Baxxter in the Video Work of Scooter - Paul Hegarty, University College Cork, Ireland
13. Blackened puppets: Chris Cunningham's weird anatomies - Dean Lockwood, University of Lincoln, UK
Digital Mediations and Mutations
Introduction: Daniel Cookney
14. Timeline Philosophy: Technological Hedonism and Formal Aspects of Films and Music Videos - José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil
15. Play All / Random Play / Track Selection: Analyzing Music Videos on Greatest Hits DVD Collections - Jaap Kooijman, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
16. Why Psy? Music videos and the global market - Gina Arnold, Evergreen State College, USA
17. Vimeo Killed the Video Star - Daniel Cookney, University of Salford, UK
Notes to Chapters
Videography
Works Cited

Editorial Reviews

The strange beast we call “music video” has long since overflowed the contexts and aesthetics first set for it in the era of 1980s MTV. This superbly edited collection expands our understandings of both music and video, and brings to our attention the multiplicity and complexity of their combinations in 20th and 21st century audiovisual cultures.” —Adrian Martin, author of Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (2014) and Professor, Monash University, Australia

“What can we learn from music videos? The essays in this brilliant collection move between MTV and YouTube, analog and digital, Bjork's erotics and Bowie's multiple masks, Laibach's televisual subversions and Duran Duran's audiovisual "transfiguration [from] suburban wannabes to global pop stars."” —Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA

“Music/Video panoramically explores the separate and simultaneous effects of the two media. The collection incisively probes pre-existing critiques, and literally offers re-vision of the music video in challenging expositions with broad historical and cultural inclusivity. This book's analytical discourses will certainly affect the ways its readers see music.” —Mike Alleyne, Professor of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University, USA

“Music video may well be a promotional device for the music industry, reproducing hegemonic representations of identity, but as this collection of engaging essays shows, alternative visions proliferate in the multiple spaces between high art, low culture, and viral video. Bookended by a historical view on the music video aesthetic, and an assessment of contemporary digital and online music video, the collection offers welcome examples of female self-representation that attempt to reach beyond objectification, as well as of experimental approaches to the art of music video.” —Hillegonda C Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture, London South Bank University, UK

“Music video has been a key cultural driver and remains beloved by audiences all over the globe, but there's much we don't understand about its history and poetics. This book is required reading for aficionados of the genre, scholars engaged with popular culture, and anyone thinking about audiovisual media in our historical moment. Full of startling connections and deep insights, the essays in Music/Video show how rich the genre has been—and how much we can learn from it.” —Carol Vernallis, Affiliated Researcher, Stanford University, USA

From the Publisher