Country Music Video Country Music Video in Country’s Year of the Woman by Julie L. Andsager and Kimberly Roe Because of the success of its new female stars, the country music industry declared 1997 its Year of the Woman. We examined how country video portrays female artists and characters. Research on other genres suggests that women are symboli- cally annihilated in music video. By analyzing 285 CMT videos, we found that most female artists’ videos portrayed women progressively, whereas male artists portrayed them stereotypically. The ratio of male to female artists’ videos was 3 to 1. Although the data suggest country video is similar to pop or rock video of the mid- 1980s, the country videos were qualitatively different in their portrayal of gender roles. In the past few years, all major genres of music have seen the emergence of female megastars, those capable of turning an album release multiplatinum. This phenomenon has been particularly noticeable in country music, a genre that gen- erally has been driven by the star power of its male performers. Artists such as Wynonna and Mary Chapin Carpenter saw tremendous success in the early to mid-1990s, earning platinum albums and headlining concerts. They were just the first wave in a new storm that hit with the release of The Woman in Me, Shania Twain’s 1996 album that became the all-time top-selling female country album, surpassing even Patsy Cline albums (CMA Marketing, 1998). At the same time, LeAnn Rimes’s hit single, Blue, launched her into the ranks of megastardom. The phenomenal success of these women has undoubtedly been a factor in expanding the boundaries of country music, making it the top radio format in the United States (CMA Marketing, 1998). The success of Rimes, Twain, and their colleagues at award shows and at cash registers led the country music industry to dub 1997 the Year of the Woman. Our purpose in this essay is to examine how well female country artists fared in that Julie L. Andsager (PhD, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 1993) is an assistant professor in the Ed- ward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University. Her research interests include media framing of health and risk issues, free expression, and gender and the media. Kimberly Roe (MS, Middle Tennessee State University, 1997) works in private industry. Her research interests include computer-mediated communication, and women and the media. This study was conducted when both authors were at Middle Tennessee State University. The authors thank Alan Rubin and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Copyright © 1999 International Communication Association 69 Journal of Communication, Winter 1999 specially designated year by analyzing ways in which artists and female characters were portrayed in country music video, an important medium in launching the careers of both male and female country artists. Country music, like rock music before it via MTV, uses music video to establish artists’ images and sell their music. New country artists can “go cut an album, produce a couple of videos . and they’ve got national exposure” (Pinkston, 1997, p. 2E). Country music videos are found primarily on two networks: Country Music Television (CMT), an all-video format that is seen in 38 million TV homes nationwide and reaches into 56% of all cable TV households, and The Nashville Network (TNN), which plays about 2 hours of videos each day and reaches 68 million U.S. households (“When the Dust Settles,” 1997). CMT remains one of the few all-music, all-the-time channels on the cable roster, with industry stalwarts such as MTV and VH-1 opting for a mix of video and original programming. Nielsen figures indicate that CMT viewers spend more time watching than viewers of either of the other two channels. The average CMT viewer watches 2 hours and 25 minutes during an average week, thus beating out VH-1 by 77 minutes and MTV by 13 minutes (CMA Marketing, 1998). The average CMT viewer is a married, White, female homemaker between the ages of 35 and 45, with some college education (Country Music Television, 1997). Music video research may experience a resurgence as video outlets expand. Although mainstream media outlets may suggest an overall decline in the popu- larity of music videos, the opposite is true for the so-called “new media” outlets, particularly the Internet (“Decline in At-Home Media,” 1998). Once largely the marketing ground for independents, with its capacity for viewers to download the videos of their choice, the Internet is now attracting the attention of record indus- try leaders. Advertisers are following the market as well, including many tradition- ally aligned with country music marketing. K-Mart recently launched a music video channel on the Web, and Levi-Strauss is targeting an entire media campaign (called I-Candy) that uses popular music video as its driving force. The clothing company has also launched a joint venture with Internet music site SonicNet, called Streamland, which provides for download on demand of music videos (Cuneo, 1997). However, the viewers accessing country videos via this medium may differ somewhat from CMT viewers. The average Internet user is a college- educated, White male between the ages of 35 and 55, who is married and em- ployed full-time in professional or sales environment (Mediamark Research Inc., 1998). Music videos, however, are more than marketing tools. Aufderheide (1986) contended that they are “powerful, if playful, postmodern art. Their raw materials are aspects of commercial popular culture, their structures those of dreams, their premise the constant permutation of identity in a world without social relation- ships” (p. 77). In his unsettling analysis of sex and power in music videos, Jhally (1995) argued that, in part, because 90% or more of video directors are male and many of the performers are male, music video perpetuates a narrow, dangerous set of systematic representations of women that are so ubiquitous in the medium that they become virtually invisible. He noted that women serve primarily as sexual objects or predators. Researchers have found that females in music videos 70 Country Music Video are limited to stereotypical occupations and portrayals (e.g., Brown & Campbell, 1986; Seidman, 1992; Sherman & Dominick, 1986). Such imagery may span across musical genres because lyric content often ap- pears unrelated to the visual imagery of the video. Indeed, Aufderheide (1986) noted that the “thin narrative threads” in song lyrics rarely provide the basis for video imagery. Because an early study of MTV videos suggested that viewers consider music videos more favorably and as more active and potent than the audio version of the same songs (Rubin et al., 1986), the visual aspects may have effects distinct from any accruing from the musical message. Rock music videos have been criticized repeatedly for their patriarchal promul- gations of sexism and violence toward women (Aufderheide, 1986; Baxter, De Riemer, Landini, Leslie, & Singletary, 1985; Jhally, 1995; Seidman, 1992; Vincent, 1989). Videos featuring female artists, however, may offer these women a unique opportunity to promote themselves as performers and to negotiate gender politics (Lewis, 1995). In the rock genre, Madonna, Tina Turner, and Cyndi Lauper, among others, were able to dominate the charts, due, in part, to their success in music videos (Lewis, 1995). Rap videos have allowed African American women rappers to negotiate sexual politics as well (Perry, 1995). For country music, whose female performers have been described as “girl singers” (Bufwack & Oermann, 1993), music video also has the opportunity to offer a wider variety of roles and images. Indeed, country music historians Bufwack and Oermann (1993) noted that coun- try music video “demanded new faces; and this revolutionized a music style known for its perennial personalities” (emphasis added; p. 482). However, music videos, regardless of genre and how much power female art- ists seem to exert, appear to have followed in the footsteps of early television with regard to gender roles, particularly in the portrayal of women. As discussed be- low, researchers have shown that female artists’ videos tend to receive less airplay than male artists’ videos, the women are more likely to appear in scanty clothing, and they are often portrayed as sexual objects or in other condescending ways. These types of portrayals are consistent with symbolic annihilation, Tuchman’s (1978) notion of how women were typically portrayed on television. Symbolic annihilation consists of absence, trivialization, and condemnation. In country music video, as in other genres, absence would be evidenced by a strong disparity between men’s and women’s videos in terms of frequency of play. Trivialization and condemnation would be apparent through sexist portrayals of women’s roles, overt emphasis on women’s bodies and youth, and scanty or alluring clothing that would increase the potential for objectifying women. Research Questions The growing popularity of country music in the U.S. and around the world sug- gests that country music needs to be examined. Given the industry’s self-pro- claimed Year of the Woman in 1997, the time seemed ripe to analyze how country music video portrayed women’s roles and, perhaps more importantly because of their status as role models, female country artists. Do country music videos sym- bolically annihilate women? The research questions we addressed in this study were these: 71 Journal of Communication, Winter 1999 RQ1: How are female and male artists portrayed in country music video, in terms of their roles and appearance? RQ2: How are female characters portrayed in this genre? Whose vision is rep- resented? Literature Review After slightly more than a decade of content analyses of gender in music videos, country music video has been a neglected genre.