REVIEW | Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media

Abstract

"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'."-- The persistence of the music video form from NTV to twenty-first-century social media / Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard -- The pleasures of music video / Sunil Manghani -- From Broadway to Phineas and Ferb : the rise of music(al comedy) videos / Michael Saffle -- 'The message' is the medium : aesthetics, ideology, and the hip hop music video / Greg de Cuir Jr. -- The boy kept swinging : David Bowie, music video, and the star image / Julie Lobalzo Wright -- The perfect kiss : new order and the music video / Andrew Burke -- Liquidities for the Essex man : the monetarist eroticism of British yacht pop / Benjamin Halligan -- Completing the mystery of her flesh : love, eroticism and identity in Bjork's videos / Vera Brozzoni -- Soundtrack self : FKA twigs, music video and celebrity feminism / Kirsty Fairclough -- Anal terrorism in Nicki Minaj's 'Anaconda' / Fabrício Silveira -- Moving the music : dance, action and embodied identity / Sarie Mairs Slee -- Audiovision and Gesamtkunstwerk : the aesthetics of first- and second-generation industrial music video / Michael Goddard -- One. world : self-effacement of H.P. Baxxter in the video work of Scooter / Paul Hegarty -- Blackened puppets : Chris Cunningham's weird anatomies / Dean Lockwood -- Timeline philosophy : technological hedonism and formal aspects of films and music videos / José Cláudio Siqueira Castanheira -- The boxed aesthetics and metanarratives of stardom : analyzing music videos on DVD compilations / Jaap Kooijman -- Why Psy? Music videos and the global market / Gina Arnold -- Vimeo killed the video star : burial and the user-generated music video / Daniel Cookney.