“Where are we now?” was the question David Bowie asked in a music video directed by American plastician Tony Oursler, and released in 2013. Over the years, Bowie created many avatars, notably thanks ...to music videos, and in 2016, he would even metaphorically depict his own death in Lazarus. In Where are we now?, he highlighted the questions of disappearance and posterity in particular. On a formal level, the video refers to two genres which can seem very opposite: on the one hand, lyric videos, that are official textual music videos, featuring the lyrics of the illustrated song; on the other hand, video installation and contemporary art. This paper proposes to analyse this music video in the light of equivocality, ambiguities and duplications within a dense network of signs. It will also consider the hybridization, of genres and of Bowie’s body and self-representation as well. The writing of lyrics on screen, which is specific to lyric video as a genre, seems an invitation to interpretation. Specifically, the importance given to the text leads to notice the gradual fading of Bowie himself, as a singer, behind his own song. In the end of the video, he will indeed totally disappear from the screen – a disappearance that echoes afterwards with Bowie’s actual death, a few years later.
This report evaluates the significance of the AHRC-funded “Fifty Years of British Music Video” research project and its written and digital outputs on existing knowledge of the UK screen industries. ...It notes that heretofore music video, like advertising, has been a neglected domain of research commissioned by the British Film Institute and of work archived by the BFI’s National Film Archive. It has also been overlooked in reports commissioned by the Government into the UK’s creative industries. Yet the project’s research findings, taken in collaboration with other past and present research on British film and television, suggest that the sector has played a crucial role in talent development and innovation. The report urges the need for further research in this area.
Although of the potential growth of music video marketing in Vietnam, rare research explores its effectiveness in branding. This study examines the influence of celebrity image and musical congruity ...in a music video on brand awareness, attitude, purchase intention, Word-of-Mouth intention, and the significance of celebrity and music to a music video value. This study gathered data from an online survey of 327 participants to measure hypotheses and factors established in the research model. The collected data were transferred to SPSS and AMOS software. The findings indicate that music video marketing effectively gains customers’ attitudes toward the brand, significantly impacting their intention to purchase or Word-of-Mouth about it. Notably, music receives more appreciation from participants in more excellent contributions to the value of the whole music video than the celebrity. This research adds to the knowledge of the relationship between brand attitude and brand awareness of Vietnamese consumers in Music Video (MV) marketing. From this work, scholars and marketers can gain better insights into their marketing strategies to create a compelling music video marketing campaign in Vietnam.
Music videos continue to be one of the most adaptable forms of media due to their unique ability to remediate everything from Western films to Zoom meetings. Their relatively low budgets and ever ...flexible assemblages of audiovisual components make them sites for experimentation, and they regularly recombine generic conventions from a range of media. This essay makes the case that studying music video demands a multifaceted approach to genre: if we accept that music video is a moving assemblage of genres and media, we can move toward unpacking the unique configurations of genre and medium in a given music video or subset of music videos. This method might suggest a shift in the way we think through genre in the future, moving away from single genre studies (however expansive or changeable a given genre might be) and toward studies that treat genre in a more recombinatory way.
This article was inspired by the controversy over claims of ‘pedophilia!!!’ undertones and the ‘triggering’ of memories of childhood sexual abuse in some viewers by the dance performance featured in ...the music video for Sia’s ‘Elastic Heart’ (2015). The case is presented for acknowledging the hidden and/or overlooked presence of dance in social scientific theory and cultural studies and how these can enhance and advance cultural criminological research. Examples of how these insights have been used within other disciplinary frameworks to analyse and address child sex crime and sexual trauma are provided, and the argument is made that popular cultural texts such as dance in pop music videos should be regarded as significant in analysing and tracing public perceptions and epistemologies of crimes such as child sex abuse.
A nadie escapa que el videoclip es una Imago Musicae abierta al experimentalismo estético, siempre presta a la caza y captura oportunista de la cita y el fragmento. Igualmente, se muestra susceptible ...de trazar sinergias, transferencias e interferencias con el arte moderno y el arte histórico para generar una nueva imaginería al servicio de los flamantes ídolos, necesidades y expectativas de la sociedad de consumo. En otras ocasiones, abordamos la fenomenología de las subculturas urbanas y su interrelación con los movimientos musicales y el videoclip, concretándola en cinco estudios de caso -new romantic, techno, hard rock/heavy metal, rappers y DJs- que permitieron perfilar/ratificar/establecer identificadores y claves iconográficas precisas para su reconocimiento y puesta en valor. Ahora, seguimos profundizando en la validez del método iconográfico aplicado al videoclip como género mediático creador de nuevas mitogenias e instrumento de difusión de valores, inquietudes y atributos de grandes tendencias músico-culturales desde 1981 hasta hoy. Nos detendremos en valores específicos que permiten diseccionar los factores claves para construir mitogenias particulares, sin olvidar establecer/codificar premisas ad hoc para reconocer/distinguir/poner en valor la significación del DJ en la cultura popular de nuestro tiempo. También estudiamos su iconografía, apoyándonos en los videoclips referenciales y otros productos mediáticos.
Music can serve as an important vehicle for making political statements, cohering community and forming solidarity at the intersections of identity, and exposing structures of inequality linked to ...(post)colonially informed power hierarchies of race, gender, and sexuality. However, intensified global flows of images and capital in a time of digital dominance have reconfigured existing notions of musical 'protest'. Through a systemic functional-multimodal approach to the music video for Cuban American artist Seidy 'La Niña' Carrera's Tumbao, this article argues that the politics of identity in music video are often rather compromised to offer certain kinds of precarious resistance. The tensions between the political and the creative-commercial in Seidy's interpellation as a foreign-but-familiar, national/diasporic-but-exotic mulata cubana evince the ambivalence of claims to protest when they become hypervisible on a 'global screen.' A hypervisible figure must market themselves in certain ways; any kind of political intervention must be carefully balanced and constantly negotiated. Ultimately, this article highlights a new identity politics of hypervisibility that is inextricably tied to music as a form of resistance in an age of streaming and video-sharing.
How does music play a role in normalising men's sexual violence towards women? Using mainstream rock and metal music as an illustrative case study, we offer a nuanced account of the ways in which ...men's sexual violence is normalised. Using a definition of sexual violence drawn from Liz Kelly's notion of a continuum, which reframes sexual violence as the loss of women's ability to control sexual experiences, we explore the ways in which sexual violence is a prevalent lyrical and audio-visual component of rock and metal songs. We show that a pernicious theme of rock and metal over the last 25 years is the erosion of women's ability to refuse sexual activity and to have voice and be heard. We argue that this erosion of women's consent takes place through the representational use of emotional abuse, controlling/coercive behaviour, and through the objectification of women. The erasure of consent presented through these methods becomes a key means of establishing sexual control. Through manipulation, the confusion of what counts as sexual violence and how it is defined, men's sexual violence against women is normalised.
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