![]() ![]() 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”. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. 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. ![]() On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. ![]() The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. 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. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. We hope our tack will inspire a confederated approach, where art historians, dance scholars, media experts, and those who work on poetry and rap lyrics, costuming and architecture would write alongside us. Each of us takes on a different facet: Dani Oore writes on the song’s rhythm arrangement, Eric Lyon attends to rhythm and the song’s production features, Gabriel Ellis attends to the song’s multiply-stylized vocal performances, Maeve Sterbenz considers harmony and gesture Gabrielle Lochard looks closely at race and the background figures Dale Chapman attends to “APESH**T” in relation to other African American, opulent, art-inspired videos as well as their bonds to neoliberalism Jason King considers larger contemporary phenomena, including other films, that turn to the museum as a historical repository that might help us solve what feels like humanity under threat Kyra Gaunt describes how The Carters confront exclusionary regimes of power and other “ape-shit” through a mosaic of art, music, and media and I offer an overview of music-video aesthetics, and some possible ways of finding a path through the video. Music videos are open forms, and as each analyst charts his or her path through the video, we can get a sense of a personal perspective (and readers can then more carefully track their own trajectories as well). (This might include looking at a dance gesture against a harmonic shift and an edit, and asking how these might relate to one another.) A collective approach is probably the best way to understand a clip and the genre, and also adds some benefits. ![]() It’s not only due to, as Ann Kaplan has observed, that music videos straddle a border between advertising and art, but that the analyst must also feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. We can imagine why there’s been such a paucity of music-video scholarship. This colloquy may be the first multi-perspective, in-depth look at a music video. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |