Music Video: Industrial Product, Cultural Form

Introduction: Hidden Screen Industries – British Music Video and Absent Bodies

“…The objective of our project was to redress gaps in scholarship on music videos, using our unprecedented industry access. Designed as a collaboration between our universities, the British Library, the British Film Institute and Thunderbird Releasing, it sought to redress the emphasis in extant literature on the USA by examining British music videos released between 1966 and 2016, and sought to redress the methodological predominance of textual analyses by examining, instead, empirical evidence regarding their production and distribution, and the impact, influence and industry of British music videos as a commercial product and cultural form (Laing 1985).…”

“…Music video is a fledgling subject which sits in between a number of established academic disciplines and has consequently fallen between the institutional and theoretical cracks and crevices of those disciplines. Popular music studies and cultural studies have informed the more established efforts (see for example Laing (1985), Goodwin (1992), Negus (1992), Frith (1996), Beebe and Middleton (2007)). But film and television studies have only rarely attempted to address video with Mundy's (1999) work on British musicals and Donnelly's essay on British experimental music videos (2007).…”

Structural relationships of music and images in music video

“…The apparently widely accepted mainstream line of explanation of these characteristic traits is based on the argument of postmodernism: the 'postmodern condition', pervading all of contemporary industrialised society, finds its most adequate representation in the fragmentary forms of music video, combining practices from Classical high art, avant-garde modernism and popular culture (see, for instance, Aufderheide 1986;Kaplan 1987;Strom 1989). While postmodernism sometimes approaches the vague, all-embracing status of a Zeitgeist, many scholars relate it, and the characteristics of music video, to the development of the specific media codes of commercial television (Berland 1986;Jones 1988;Kaplan 1987;Larsen 1987), and especially, stressing the advertising function of music video, to the aesthetics of television advertising (Allan 1990;Frith 1988;Goodwin 1987;Kinder 1984;Laing 1985;Movin and 0berg 1990;Strom 1989 and others). While postmodernism sometimes approaches the vague, all-embracing status of a Zeitgeist, many scholars relate it, and the characteristics of music video, to the development of the specific media codes of commercial television (Berland 1986;Jones 1988;Kaplan 1987;Larsen 1987), and especially, stressing the advertising function of music video, to the aesthetics of television advertising (Allan 1990;Frith 1988;Goodwin 1987;Kinder 1984;Laing 1985;Movin and 0berg 1990;Strom 1989 and others).…”

“…The evaluation of the consequences of this situation varies among authors; whereas, for instance, Fiske (1986) regards the 'refusing of sense' as a practice potentially liberating from bourgeois hegemony of meaning, Tetzlaff (1986) is more pessimistic as to the existence of any such emancipatory potential. While postmodernism sometimes approaches the vague, all-embracing status of a Zeitgeist, many scholars relate it, and the characteristics of music video, to the development of the specific media codes of commercial television (Berland 1986;Jones 1988;Kaplan 1987;Larsen 1987), and especially, stressing the advertising function of music video, to the aesthetics of television advertising (Allan 1990;Frith 1988;Goodwin 1987;Kinder 1984;Laing 1985;Movin and 0berg 1990;Strom 1989 and others). The loss, in this process, of rock music's presupposed 'authenticity' of expression is also commented upon (Grossberg 1988); this is described both in negative terms (Movin and 0berg 1990), and approvingly, as offering the means for a 'celebration of artifice' (Ihlemann 1992).…”

“…The opinion has been proposed that, for the user, the music is somehow 'dominated' by the visuals (Berland 1986;Kinder 1984;Tetzlaff 1986); this, however, seems to have little bearing on matters other than the individual mode of perception and musical preferences of these scholars. Others point out that historically, popular music performance has always been an audiovisual phenomenon, combining musical sound and visuals (Berland 1986;Goodwin 1987;Laing 1985), and several authors state that music is primary in relation to the visuals, although without elaborating much further on the nature and consequences of this primacy (Goodwin 1987;Laing 1985;Strom 1989). Kaplan seems to regard music video visuals as mainly based on song lyrics (1987, pp.…”