Music Video After MTV

Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music

Mathias Korsgaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317208327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Pop Music

Since the 1980s, music videos have been everywhere, and today almost all of the most-viewed clips on YouTube are music videos. However, in academia, music videos do not currently share this popularity. Music Video After MTV gives music video its due academic credit by exploring the changing landscapes surrounding post-millennial music video. Across seven chapters, the book addresses core issues relating to the study of music videos, including the history, analysis, and audiovisual aesthetics of music videos. Moreover, the book is the first of its kind to truly address the recent changes following the digitization of music video, including its changing cycles of production, distribution and reception, the influence of music videos on other media, and the rise of new types of online music video. Approaching music videos from a composite theoretical framework, Music Video After MTV brings music video research up to speed in several areas: it offers the first account of the research history of music videos, the first truly audiovisual approach to music video studies and it presents numerous inspiring case studies, ranging from classics by Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham to recent experimental and interactive videos that interrogate the very limits of music video.

1 Defining music video

The synching of visuals to music is probably the single most powerful media phenomenon of this century.

—Gerald Casale (DEVO)

In order to be able to study music video at all, it is necessary to begin by defining what constitutes a music video. At the outset, this seems like a simple task, but many questions quickly surface. When was the first music video made? What formal traits characterize the music video? Is it a genre, a medium, or something else? As I will show, none of these questions allows as straightforward an answer as one might think—and some of them are practically unanswerable. However, in this chapter, I try to address these questions, and, in my attempt to define what a music video is, I follow three trajectories: the history of music video, an attempted formal definition of music video, and the question of music video genres. In all three cases, I argue for the complexity of music video. As to its history, music video is shown to have a rich and multifaceted prehistory. Music video has many different and surprising precursors and is shown to have taken on its contemporary shape by remediating a wide variety of different media types. Concerning its trademarks, music video is defined by its very ability to resist such formal definitions as it constantly transgresses its own norms. Whatever formal definitions we set up, there will always be music videos that elude such capture. Generically, music video is composite in that it relates to and cuts across musical, visual, and perhaps even audiovisual genres. In a way, then, this chapter functions as an introduction to not only music video itself but also to the history of research on music video so far.

The history of music video

As music videos exploded into the public consciousness following the launch of MTV in 1981, music video and MTV slowly came to be considered almost synonymous. Since MTV was the main delivery channel for music videos, it has been common to confuse the music video with its channel of distribution (MTV). It was only in some of the second-wave literature on music video that this fallacy was identified. In 1999, Antti-Ville Kärjä observed that “every time we talk about music videos in their media context we almost without exception refer only to television.”¹ Likewise, Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton note that the “use of MTV as a stand-in for music video has become increasingly problematic.”² The reason this has become increasingly problematic is of course that music videos are not only seen on MTV—in fact, music videos are being shown increasingly on media other than television. The pre-MTV history of music videos tells us the same thing: music video was never an exclusively televisual phenomenon to begin with, and the birth of music video clearly antedates the birth of MTV.

Indeed, as Diane Railton and Paul Watson have suggested, “music video’s association with television may well turn out to be a pre-historical anomaly.”³ This is becoming increasingly true as music video has transmigrated from one main platform (TV) onto several others; correspondingly, a wider range of program types has replaced the initial 24-hour flow of music videos on MTV. What was once considered an exclusively televisual genre must now be (and always should have been) thought of as something else: an audiovisual form in its own right, probably even a medium in its own right (as I will argue in chapter 2). However, it is a medium with a rich prehistory—a medium that has developed its own means of expression by remediating a wide range of other media types. In this way, the prehistory of music video might tell us a great deal about its forms and functions in its current manifestations.

It turns out, then, that “music video has not one, but several histories.”⁴ Music videos certainly did not just appear overnight with the launch of MTV; rather, they came into existence only gradually and as the offspring of many different precursors. So, following my general idea that music video responds to the logics of remediation, this is also true in a historical sense: while music videos may indeed appear “new” in their employment of audiovisual language (or may have appeared “new” when they were first produced), what is “new” about music video is rather the way that it reworks “the old.”⁵

I propose that its history can be divided into three distinct phases: a pre-televisual phase, a televisual phase, and the current post-televisual phase. In many ways, most of this book concerns the post-televisual phase (which is treated more extensively in other chapters, particularly chapter 7); however, in this section, I will focus mainly on the pre-televisual phase to map out exactly what it is that music video reworks or remediates. It is worth noting that this book does not engage extensively with the televisual phase. This is for two main reasons: first, the history of music television (and especially of MTV) has already been treated extensively elsewhere;⁶ second, the entire history of music video and the developments within the form in its televisual stage deserve a separate treatment, probably an entire book of its own, and this is not my concern here.

Only a few scattered attempts have been made at writing the history of the music video. The two most notable contributions are Michael Shore’s 1985 book and Saul Austerlitz’s 2007 book. Apart from these two sources, only less extensive accounts exist. The popular and abridged version of the history of music video can be summed up as follows: music video has many forerunners that range all the way back to the early days of cinema. But, during the 1960s, it gradually took on a shape similar to the one we know today, and the music video began appearing on television in the 1970s. With the launch of MTV in America in 1981 (and in Europe in 1987), music video became immensely popular and assumed a more finite shape. Correspondingly, music video experienced its first golden age in the 1980s. In the 1990s, the budgets for music videos rose, and music video arguably became an increasingly auteurist medium, though it seemed to slowly decline between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, both financially and creatively. However, it has since been revitalized online and is now experiencing a second golden age, partially as a consequence of cheaper production tools, easier distribution, and user-driven remix culture.

If the music video is conceived of as a marriage between the musical recording and the moving image, then its history can be said to date back primarily to some of the technological developments of the late 19^th century with the invention of the musical recording and, a little later, the birth of cinema and the moving image.⁷ If the music video is seen as part of the general history of intermedia and multimedia, a long history of semiotic clashes of image, sound and word, then its history dates back much further—back to the Wagnerian and Romanticist notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk, back to the birth of opera in the 16^th century, and even all the way back to the Aristotelian drama and its combination of opsis, melos and lexis. However, the first approach seems more appropriate here, since my aim is to situate music video in the contemporary landscape of new media.

Music video can also be seen as part of a trajectory that stretches all the way back to early silent cinema,⁸ the so-called “cinema of attractions”⁹—a link also suggested by Heidi Peeters.¹⁰ It appears that, in some ways, music video is indeed more similar to early silent cinema than to the tradition of narrative film, which, according to Tom Gunning, attained dominance from about 1906 onwards. There are at least two points at which Gunning’s description of the early forms of silent cinema interlocks with music video. First, there is “the radical heterogeneity” that Gunning observes in this cinema, which is comparable to the heterogeneity that I trace in the realm of music video (both in the introduction and later in this chapter). Second, there is the mutual privileging of spectacle. Like the cinema of attractions, music video overtly “displays its visibility”¹¹ in arousing the curiosity of its viewer through (audio)visual spectacle. This spectacle is often of a directly cinematic or stylistic nature, as witnessed by the shared propensity for image manipulation. For example, Gunning notes how trick photography, uses of slow and reverse motion, and superimposition were fairly common in early cinema. Unquestionably, this tendency to experiment with the possibilities of altering the image has been continued and even amplified in music video (for more on this, see chapters 4 and 5).

Elsewhere, Gunning proposes a link of a similar kind—not between music video and the cinema of attractions but between the beginning and end of the 20^th century.¹² Apart from the fact that both periods are characterized by major technological developments, the intense privileging of spectacle in the aesthetic forms of the early 20^th century is mirrored in the allegedly spectacular nature of contemporary (digital) culture—a claim also convincingly made by Andrew Darley, who traces a history of spectacle in visual culture, zooming in on, among other phenomena, the prehistory of cinema, the music video, and recent digital formats.¹³ Teresa Rizzo follows a similar line of reasoning in suggesting a connection between the cinema of attractions and current YouTube practices, though she does not mention music video itself.¹⁴ We can thus trace a line from silent cinema through music video to contemporary digital practices.

Moreover, there is yet another link between music video and silent cinema. In a paradoxical way, music video can be said to be mute like silent cinema,¹⁵ since there is no causal link between sound and image in music video (and as both normally lack spoken dialogue). In sound film, it is common for the images and sounds to correspond, meaning that the visual sources producing the sounds we hear are seen on screen at the same time as we hear this sound.¹⁶ In music videos, however, the sounds and the images do not necessarily correspond, and most of the time they do not. Even when efforts are made to obtain this correspondence, as for instance in the many performance videos where the band pretends to perform the song, the result is often an uneasy disjunction between images and sounds.¹⁷

Commenting on the “muteness” of the music video image, Carol Vernallis notes that music video editing tends to lean towards the principles of montage editing developed by Sergei Eisenstein¹⁸ and other Soviet filmmakers of the silent era: “André Bazin notes that montage disappeared from cinema when sound arrived, to be replaced by the seamless editing we now take for granted. One can see how the silent image track of music video might lend itself to montage.”¹⁹ Since music videos usually cannot communicate through diegetic sound (or at least only to a limited degree²⁰), their editing techniques sometimes try to compensate for this lack by turning towards the more expressive tropes of Soviet montage, creating meaning through conflicting images.²¹ Another reason montage is a common practice in music video concerns the fact that montage “is the visual equivalent of music built up...