scholarly journals Lori A. Burns & Stan Hawkins, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis

Volume ! ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 187-193
Author(s):  
Antoine Gaudin
Popular Music ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Straw

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-106
Author(s):  
Lisa Perrott

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.


2020 ◽  
pp. 215-222
Author(s):  
Landon Palmer

This chapter concludes the volume with a concise coda that problematizes the genre and medium specificity of categories such as “rock” and “cinema,” and interrogates their relevance to understanding popular music stardom onscreen in the twenty-first century. By exploring several recent visual albums, this coda demonstrates how the history of rock stardom onscreen paved the way for the unification of the feature film and the music video on display in this unique form. Yet, at the same time, visual albums present musicians with renewed opportunity for overt political expression and aesthetic experimentation not seen since late 1960s rock movies. Visual albums are ultimately the latest intersection between the recording industry and moving image media—an intersection that, as this book demonstrates, has a rich and enduring history.


Author(s):  
Joseph Abramo

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.


Author(s):  
Chih-Chieh Liu

This chapter, starting from a seemingly standardized dance promotion in Mandarin pop, one of the dominant music genres in East Asia, attempts to reveal the cultural logics and to denaturalize the corporeal discourses behind what is commonly perceived as the “naturally” spectacular hip movement of a Chinese-American superstar, Coco Lee, whose dance is, in Taiwan, often linked with the idea of “sexiness” and “American-ness.” Calling upon Judith Butler’s idea of performativity (1990) in tandem with Richard Dyer’s notion of star image (1979) and the concept of the dancing body (Thomas 1995; Foster 1996), this chapter, using music video analysis (Vernallis 2004; Beebe and Middleton 2007), delineates Coco’sHip Hop Tonight(2006) to point out the contradictions and reversals of the body in contemporary multimedial context in that “sexiness” is desexualized, “American-ness” is Sinocized, and the meaning of “Chinese-ness” continues to shift according to local cultural and political sensibilities. In this process, music video becomes an intersecting point in which cultural boundaries negotiate and body politics fight to gain the upper hand, revealing a web of complex power struggles in Taiwan where meaning of the body is locally produced yet globally contested.


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