scholarly journals YouTube, ageing and PJ Harvey: An ‘everyday’ story of the erasure of age

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1155-1167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Sara Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Digital Environment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ageing Body ◽  
Screen Space ◽  
The Relationship

Ageing is starting to matter in popular cultural studies but the matter of ageing within YouTube is, at present, unwritten. This article is an attempt to start that process. YouTube hosts the music video for PJ Harvey’s single release The Community of Hope (2016) . Shot by Seamus Murphy, it shares screen space with official music videos from Harvey’s 23-year career. Raising questions about the relationship between her past and present, this article examines the link between YouTube and ageing through two concepts, repetitive circularity and the flat archive. These rely and inform each other in a process that prioritizes the presence of youthfulness through the absenting of age, whereby the ageing body is erased from a popular cultural forum. YouTube’s ‘wallpaper of the past’ has a nagging impact on how we might read the body’s progress through time, in particular, how it ages. Tackling the paucity of work on ageing as it surfaces within the changing topographies of popular music encounters, the article considers how ageing is presented within a digital environment such as YouTube and concludes that the story is one of age erasure.

scholarly journals Absence and Presence: Top of the Pops and the Demand for Music Videos in the 1960s

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-544
Author(s):  
Justin Smith
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
British Music ◽  
American Artists ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Uk ◽  
International Success ◽  
The Relationship

While there is a surprising critical consensus underpinning the myth that British music video began in the mid-1970s with Queen's video for ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, few scholars have pursued John Mundy's (1999) lead in locating its origins a decade earlier. Although the relationship between film and the popular song has a much longer history, this article seeks to establish that the international success of British beat groups in the first half of the 1960s encouraged television broadcasters to target the youth audience with new shows that presented their idols performing their latest hits (which normally meant miming to recorded playback). In the UK, from 1964, the BBC's Top of the Pops created an enduring format specifically harnessed to popular music chart rankings. This format created a demand for the top British artists' regular studio presence which their busy touring schedules could seldom accommodate; American artists achieving British pop chart success rarely appeared on the show in person. These frequent absences, then, coupled with the desire by broadcasters elsewhere in Europe and America to present popular British acts, created a demand for pre-recorded or filmed inserts to be produced and shown in lieu of the artists themselves appearing. Drawing on records held at the BBC's Written Archives and elsewhere, and interviews with a number of 1960s music video directors, this article evidences TV's demand-driver and illustrates how the ‘pop promo’, in the hands of some, became a creative enterprise which exceeded television's requirement to cover for an artist's studio absence.

Experimental animation and the neosurrealist remediation of popular music video

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Lisa Perrott
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Animation Technique ◽  
Experimental Animation ◽  
Functionally Diverse

Once appearing to function primarily as a commercial tool for popular entertainment, the popular form of music video has recently been exposed by scholars as formally and functionally diverse, with a rich history stretching back decades before the advent of MTV. Animated music videos owe much to centuries old traditions spanning the visual, musical and performing arts, providing performative and material models that inspire contemporary video directors. Experimental animation, surrealism and music video form a matrix of historical and contemporary significance; however, few scholars have undertaken close examinations of the relations between them. John Richardson and Mathias Korsgaard show how music video directors have employed surrealist compositional strategies together with experimental animation methods, thus giving rise to challenging new forms that traverse disparate approaches to art and culture. Building upon their contributions, this article explores the continuity between experimental animation, surrealism and music video, with a view to discovering the subversive potential of this matrix. In order to probe this potential, the author examines how music video directors experiment with animation technique as a means of subversion and enrichment of popular music video. Through close analysis of music videos directed by Adam Jones, Stephen Johnson, Floria Sigismondi and Chris Hopewell, this article charts the continuity of surrealist strategy across culturally specific moments in history, thus provoking questions around the perceived functions of animated media and popular music video.

Polyphonie und Audiovision

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernand Hörner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Audiovisual Material ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
The Third ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
And Linguistics ◽  
The Voice

This interdisciplinary analysis uses concepts of voice and polyphony both as visible, audible and understandable means of expression and as abstract analytical categories for the interpretation of music videos. The study combines abstract concepts of voice from music, media, literary and cultural studies, and linguistics with an analysis of the orchestration of the voice in the audiovisual form of music videos. The book has three parts: The first part highlights theories of voices and polyphony. The second part consists of the audiovisual transcription of a music video (‘Verliebt’ by the German rap group Antilopen Gang) by means of the online transcription tool trAVis. The third part offers an interpretation of the music video, joining the transcription with the theoretical concepts and the methodological approaches based on polyphony. This music video serves as an exhaustive test of ‘polyphony’ as a theoretical and methodological background against which one can interpret audiovisual material.

Negotiating Gender, Popular Culture, and Social Justice in Music Education

2015 ◽  
pp. 581-597
Author(s):  
Joseph Abramo
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Female Empowerment ◽  
Music Video ◽  
The World ◽  
Relations Of Power

This chapter describes how educators may use Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model to create instruction and curricula that challenge students to critically examine popular music. Through this process, students generate dominant, oppositional, and negotiated readings of songs, music videos, and other popular culture texts, and situate these readings within relations of power and privilege. This pedagogical process is illustrated in an analysis of contested notions of “female empowerment” in Beyoncé Knowles’s music video Run the World (Girls). Finally, limitations of the encoding/decoding model are accounted in order to create new aims for social justice in music education, including the exploration of diversity and the exploration of societal power and privilege in the production and reception of popular music.

Social media engagements of music videos on YouTube’s official artist channels

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110549
Author(s):  
Yun Kyung Oh ◽  
Joon Yeon Choeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Social Engagements ◽  
Positive Engagement ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

As social platforms become essential in promoting songs, many artists create an official channel on YouTube and encourage their fans’ engagements. However, little is known about the effectiveness of official videos in generating fans’ media engagements. We conduct two empirical studies to investigate the relationship between official video attributes, media engagements and channel subscribers. First, we propose a model to explain how music video attributes facilitate the relative social media engagements of a video. Second, we test whether three types of social engagements are associated with an increase in official channel subscribers. To do so, we collect social media engagement data for the 2896 music videos uploaded between May 2016 and April 2019 by 105 artists who own their YouTube official artist channels. The empirical evidence shows that the official videos incorporating visual, performance and storytelling components can generate more positive engagement from the viewers, while audio-only videos exhibit lower overall engagement intensity. Furthermore, we find that active media engagement, such as leaving ‘comments’, contributes to the increase in channel subscribers beyond the effect of the number of registered videos. Our results suggest that highly involved music fans may show the active types of social engagements, such as leaving a comment on live and follow-up videos. In practice, our findings imply that YouTube creators need to incorporate visual-focused platform characteristics to stimulate in-depth social engagement.

The aesthetics of music video: an analysis of Madonna's ‘Cherish’

Popular Music ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Vernallis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Film Theory ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Music Video ◽  
To Come

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation.

Video in the machine: the incorporation of music video into the recording industry

Popular Music ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Banks
Keyword(s):  
Music Videos ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Recording Industry ◽  
Record Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Important Form

Music video has become an increasingly integral component of the music recording business over the past three decades. Major US record companies with international divisions have made music clips since the 1970s to promote their acts in the UK and continental Europe where television shows were a more important form of promotion for recording artists. However, record labels did not make a full commitment to music clips until after the premiere of MTV in August 1981 as a 24-hour US cable programme service presenting an endless stream of music videos. As MTV's popularity blossomed in the early 1980s, music video revitalised a troubled record industry suffering a prolonged recession by prompting renewed consumer interest in pop music and successfully developing several new recording acts like Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Boy George with provocative visual images.

Popping the question: the function and effect of popular music in cinema

Popular Music ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Lapedis
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
Music Video ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Conventional Practice ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

Claudia Gorbman, in her afterword to Unheard Melodies, looks forward to the ‘new’ phenomenon of the increased use of recorded popular music in the movies. She questions whether the contemporary use of popular music is essentially different from its use in the traditional Hollywood musical, wherein conventional practice permits a musical number to disrupt the narrative flow, and answers that ‘a hybrid is emerging, unlike diegetic music which is normally not listened to, and also not as focused as musical numbers issuing from the magic world of the musical’ (Gorbman 1987, p.162). Certainly, the music video, as Gorbman admits, in its ‘kaleidoscope of forms’ (ibid.) is changing the relationship between visuals and music, so that there is no longer a habitual hierarchy of sound supporting image, or vice versa. It is this shifting relationship and the way in which pop music specifically operates upon the narrative structure of cinema that I wish to explore here.

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