The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis

Lori A. Burns, Stan Hawkins, Lori A. Burns, Stan Hawkins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781501342349
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teoría y apreciación musicales

Music videos promote popular artists in cultural forms that circulate widely across social media networks. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, the music video has become available to millions worldwide, and continues to serve as a fertile platform for the debate of issues and themes in popular culture. This volume of essays serves as a foundational handbook for the study and interpretation of the popular music video, with the specific aim of examining the industry contexts, cultural concepts, and aesthetic materials that videos rely upon in order to be both intelligible and meaningful. Easily accessible to viewers in everyday life, music videos offer profound cultural interventions and negotiations while traversing a range of media forms. From a variety of unique perspectives, the contributors to this volume undertake discussions that open up new avenues for exploring the creative changes and developments in music video production. With chapters that address music video authorship, distribution, cultural representations, mediations, aesthetics, and discourses, this study signals a major initiative to provide a deeper understanding of the intersecting and interdisciplinary approaches that are invoked in the analysis of this popular and influential musical form.

Part I

Authorship, Production, and Distribution

1

Changing Dynamics and Diversity in Music Video Production and Distribution

Mathias Bonde Korsgaard

At this moment, as I commence writing this chapter, the music video de jour is without a doubt Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,”¹ directed by accomplished music video director Hiro Murai.² The video premiered on May 5, 2018, and, in approximately a week, it had received more than 100 million YouTube views (a figure that has likely multiplied several times as you are reading these words). Along the way the music video has sparked a lot of debate, think pieces, and social media discussion, and the song went on to debut at the top spot of the Billboard Hot 100, arguably largely on the basis of the popularity and ubiquity of the video. The video is first and foremost characterized by sudden shifts in tone, both musically and visually. Musically, the track mostly alternates between a section led by choir singing and acoustic guitar that is of a somewhat cheerful nature and then another, more beat-heavy, section featuring Donald Glover’s rap and an ominous bass. Visually, we are presented with sudden and surprising moments of murderous gun violence at both times when the track transitions from the first musical section to the second—and generally the visuals are dominated by sharply irreconcilable contrasts between acts of violence and mayhem on one hand and blissfully ignorant dancing and singing on the other (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Childish Gambino, “This Is America,” directed by Hiro Murai, 2018 (0:52).

It is not hard to understand why such a video is able to draw massive attention and generate debate, thereby becoming one of the most talked-about cultural objects of its moment;³ however, this is not the only way in which this video is “of its moment.” Had it been made back when music videos were mostly seen on television, it probably would not have been seen (or perhaps even made) at all. There are several reasons why a video like this would never ever have made it onto MTV—and, in a sense, this is what this chapter is about. What separates a music video of the bygone MTV days from a contemporary music video on YouTube? And why are they different? In this chapter I will suggest that part of the answer to these questions lies in the historically changing dynamics of music video distribution. Approaching music videos from the point of view of their means of distribution will allow us to better understand how institutional and technical factors tie in with and have an effect on aesthetic practices and reception contexts. What is more, this focus on distribution would also seem to address a general deficiency in the study of music videos, given that the distribution perspective is implicit at best and entirely lacking at worst.⁴

Given that this approach has been largely neglected, the study of music video distribution clearly holds the potential to offer new perspectives. Examining music video distribution can help to make visible and explain some of the main differences between music videos of the televisual past and those of the post-televisual present. Here, I will pursue the main argument that the shift from television to the internet as the music video’s primary site of distribution is key to grasping the fact that the contemporary music video (or, music video online) is a comparatively more diverse phenomenon than the music video used to be in the MTV days. This increased diversity is manifested on several different levels. First, there is the fact that music videos are now made for a wider spectrum of musical genres. Second, there is a gradual expansion of audiovisual styles and aesthetics—if there ever was a single music video aesthetic, then surely this is no longer the case with the plurality of available styles. Third, there is also the tendency to experiment more wildly with the formal characteristics of the music video.⁵ Fourth, there has been a general broadening of the limits of representation and the possible types of content and identity politics on display in music videos, allowing for more diverse and transgressive types of imagery. And fifth, music videos are now accessed and seen in a widened array of different reception contexts. Surely, the fact that music videos are met with far fewer institutional and technical constraints in the digital age, when compared to the televisual past, is one of the main reasons behind why this cultural form has become a progressively more and more heterogeneous phenomenon. As I draw to my conclusion, I will corroborate this fact by examining the phenomenon known as the NSFW music video (NSFW stands for “not safe for work”), arguing that these clips, with their graphic content, clearly demonstrate the increasing diversity of music videos—and thus the extent to which the boundaries of the music video have broadened as a consequence of the shift from television to online distribution.

Three phases of the music video’s (distribution) history

Looking back at the development of the music video as a cultural form, it seems reasonable to divide its history into three distinct phases relating to the means of distribution: a pre-televisual, a televisual, and a post-televisual phase.⁶ In other words, music videos existed well before MTV, and now that MTV has largely turned its back on music videos with its focus on reality television, music videos have found a new home online. These changing forms of distribution should also have an impact on the study of the cultural phenomenon, because, if it is indeed true that “music video’s association with television may well turn out to be a pre-historical anomaly,”⁷ then the music video itself should not necessarily be studied as a form of television.

As with all historical periodization, there is, of course, some overlap or some transitionary moments between the main phases—or even some parallel histories involving, for instance, the distribution of music videos on VHS and DVD. Other such fissures would include the period of time leading up to the launch of MTV (i.e., the last half of the 1970s) and the time in-between the waning of the music video on MTV⁸ and its rise online (i.e., the time around the turn of the millennium), while another possible objection to this division is how one even defines “television” in the digital age.⁹ But even as such modifications are highly relevant, the general division into these three phases should still provide some clarity. This should also help make it clear to what extent these historical changes in distribution have led to corresponding changes in music video production and user engagement.

As Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena have noted on the history of the music video, it “has not one, but several histories.”¹⁰ Depending on how one defines what a music video even is, it has a complex and multifaceted lineage. Perhaps contrary to popular belief, music videos have a rather rich pre-televisual history.¹¹ Those pre-televisual phenomena that can be considered music videos avant la lettre were of course not called music videos, they were not institutionalized as such, and they did not necessarily serve the same purposes as modern-day music videos, but even so the roots of the music video arguably stretch back more than a century. Some of the most obvious precursors to the music video proper include the so-called visual jukeboxes, like the 1940s’ Panoram Soundies and the 1960s’ Scopitones. Also in the 1960s, another format that saw the light of day comprised the so-called “promos” that were in effect music videos, even though their promotional use was not yet fully determined.

But if we were to travel back in time to the 1960s and ask what people would consider to be the first ever music video, we would most likely be met by confusion. While we can trace this lineage in historical hindsight, phenomena such as these were not considered music videos in their own time. As noted by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum in their history of the “golden age of MTV,” it was not until MTV provided a steady delivery system that the music video became formalized and thereby came to connote “a specific set of qualities” including “aggressive directorship, contemporary editing and FX, sexuality, vivid colors, urgent movement, nonsensical juxtapositions, provocation, frolic” aimed for “maximum impact on the small screen.”¹² Therefore, they are also right to claim that the search for the origins of the music video is necessarily a futile task, seeing that there “is no such thing as ‘the first music video’”¹³—or, put the other way around, there are in fact too many contenders for “the first ever music video.”

This also offers a possible explanation as to why the pre-televisual music video appears to be less standardized than its televisual successor. For one thing, if they were not thought of as music videos in the first place, there were not yet any codified aesthetic norms to adhere to, and as a result experimentation was the order of the day. It was also not yet clear what kind of reception context or usage such products were aimed at—and the differences between jukebox films, promos, and for instance some of the early television formats that somewhat resembled music videos, are quite clear and also clearly a result of their different means of distribution that all entail different institutional and technical constraints. Accordingly, the pre-televisual music video is quite hard to pin down precisely because it was still quite a dispersed phenomenon.

Exactly when the music video entered its televisual phase is of course debatable. If it had not already fully found a home on television before, then it certainly did with the launch of MTV in the United States in 1981. By many accounts, the place of MTV in the history of the music video is so fundamental that the two have even become synonymous sometimes—and the history of MTV has certainly been studied more often than that of the music video in and of itself.¹⁴ Studying music videos and music television started in the 1980s and, for some, MTV offered the perfect illustration of the postmodern condition—not only because of what characterized MTV as a television network, but also because of the particular aesthetics of the music video of the MTV era. This would lead John Fiske—in a well-known article that is highly emblematic of the research on music videos of that era—to conclude that “MTV is TV at its most typical, most televisual.”¹⁵ Even if we accept the validity of this statement (and I would suggest that there are, in fact, sound reasons not to, for instance when considering the changes MTV has undergone since the article was published in 1986), the same is decidedly not true of the music video in and of itself. The music video is not and never was “TV at its most televisual,” since the music video was never restricted to distribution on television in the first place.

This non-restriction is also recognizable in some of the second-wave writings on the music video, beginning around the turn of the millennium. Here, the relation between the music video and television is problematized and not considered a natural given,¹⁶ and, when looked at from the present moment, it is certainly clear that music videos were never specifically a form of television. Rather, as this short distribution history has already demonstrated, they existed well before television, and they continue to exist after television as well. At the same time, MTV has changed quite a lot since its early days of 24-hour music video transmission. To the extent that music videos are shown on MTV at all, they are most often relegated to being shown at night time when most people do not watch television. Along these lines, one might argue that music videos appear to have been tailor-made for online distribution (even though this is obviously not the case).¹⁷ There are several reasons why music videos have transferred so well to an online environment. For one thing, in the early days of YouTube the large back catalog of music videos provided a great resource of materials at a time when content was in high demand. Also, the brevity of music videos was a particularly important feature in this period when technical restraints called for short videos. Moreover, their musical basis and their promotional nature generally make for media texts with a large appeal on any imaginable platform. And finally, the fact that they have always been aimed at “small screens” (from video jukeboxes to television sets) has made them suitable for consumption on the computer and phone screens. In fact, this nature of being a small-screen media form may turn out to be the one feature that ties all the historically different incarnations of music videos together (even as music videos have also occasionally been shown on large screens in museums and film theaters).

In particular, it is the shift from the second to the third phase—with the relocation of music videos from the television screen to several other screens—that has most significantly altered how music videos are made and enjoyed. ...