Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501313916 ISBN 13: 9781501313912

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Synopsis

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”.

About this title

About the Author

Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College in Washington, USA.
Daniel Cookney is Lecturer in Graphic Design at the University of Salford, UK.
Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean: Research and Innovation, School of Arts and Media, University of Salford, UK.
Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK.

Review

"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

"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

"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

"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

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1501313916
• ISBN 13: 9781501313912
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 328
• Editor: Arnold Gina, Cookney Daniel, Fairclough Kirsty, Goddard Michael