The Music Video in Transformation: Notes on a Hybrid Audiovisual Configuration
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The Music Video in Transformation: Notes on a Hybrid Audiovisual Configuration Tomáš Jirsa, Mathias Bonde Korsgaard Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, Volume 13, Issue 2, Autumn 2019, pp. 111-122 (Article) Published by Liverpool University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/749745 [ Access provided at 14 Sep 2020 15:52 GMT from University of Virginia Libraries & (Viva) ] 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2019.7 The Music Video in Transformation: Notes on a Hybrid Audiovisual Configuration TOMÁŠ JIRSA AND MATHIAS BONDE KORSGAARD1 Music Video in Transformation 1 Work on this article Published thirty years apart from each other, two different pieces on was part of the research music video authored by Will Straw reflect what music video studies has project ‘Between Affects and Technology: been and has become, respectively. The first of these two articles was The Portrait in the published in 1988, in the heyday of MTV, and apart from occupying Visual Arts, Literature itself with the very relation between music video and MTV, the article and Music Video’ (JG_2019_007), funded is also otherwise symptomatic of its time in the obligatory focus on by Palacký University the post-modern (Straw, 1988). Envisioned as an updated response to Olomouc, as well as part the original piece, the second piece wonders what has become of the of the research project ‘Audiovisual Literacy music video in the time that has passed, arguing that it is now ‘both and New Audiovisual ubiquitous and minor’ (Straw, 2018, p.1). The ubiquity of music video Short-Forms’ (DFF-4089- is obvious: while music videos are still occasionally shown on television, 00149), funded by the they are now commonly watched online on a variety of different screens Independent Research Fund Denmark. of varying sizes, but they have also infiltrated museums, art galleries, festivals, concert stages and the like. A great many new music videos are uploaded to YouTube on a daily basis, just like many classic videos are now also readily available on YouTube, which has led one of the most prominent audiovisual scholars, Carol Vernallis, to describe YouTube as ‘the world’s largest archive without a librarian’ (Vernallis, 2013, p.152). Claiming that the music video has simultaneously become minor would thus seem counterintuitive, at least when considering the immense aesthetic spillover from music video into other media as well as the astronomical view counts that the individual clips keep racking up, with the great majority of the most viewed clips on YouTube being music videos. Nonetheless, Straw points to the failure of music video to acquire a presence on the social media platforms of today as one reason for music video’s alleged status as a minor cultural form in the contemporary media landscape, claiming that ‘one looks for videoclips on Youtube [sic] in order to hear a song or initiate a playlist’ whereby ‘the clip itself 112 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard ♦ Music Video in Transformation has become little more than the sheathing in which a song is enclosed’ (Straw, 2018, p.1). Certainly, this status of YouTube as a platform for listening to music has also been noted by other scholars (Liikkanen & Salovaara, 2015); however, one could just as easily imagine turning this argument on its head. As the number of daily clips streamed on YouTube allegedly inches close to 5 billion2 – and with a great share 2 See https://www. of these clips being music videos – it would appear that music video is omnicoreagency.com/ youtube-statistics/. Last alive and well, perhaps even that it has only increasingly solidified as updated 6 January 2019 a main way of experiencing music altogether. There are also places in (Accessed: 25 October the world where YouTube holds the largest market share of all music 2019). See also https:// streaming services, lending support to Diane Railton and Paul Watson’s www.businessinsider.com/ how-to-get-billion-views- argument that the increasingly common practice of listening to music via viral-hit-youtube-2018- screen-based technologies implicates that ‘there will be an image-track 4?r=US&IR=T (Accessed: to accompany it’ (Railton & Watson, 2011, p.143). 25 October 2019). It is certainly also nothing new to claim that music video is in a state of crisis – or even halfway buried – but if we look back at the history of this ever-changing and protean audiovisual configuration, there is no reason to suspect that this pessimistic diagnosis is true this time around. Obviously, music video has experienced its deal of creative and financial ebbs and flows, like any other cultural form, but it has also proven its survivability time and time again, as confirmed by the increasing number of videos, studios, and directors on the one hand, and by the continuously expanding field of music video scholarship on the other. Indeed, recent years have witnessed an increasing scholarly interest in the phenomenon of the music video, even to such an extent that some of the recent works point to a paradigmatic ‘music video turn’ (Arnold et al., 2017, p.4) that could be tentatively defined as research into music video’s digital production, circulation platforms, and distribution channels, as well as its new media formations. During the last fifteen years, music video has been explored from several different points of view, including formal analysis focused on the visual and musical structure (Vernallis, 2004); cultural studies uncovering its commercial strategies derived from the music industry (Austerlitz, 2007); its identity politics with a particular focus on gender, sexuality, and race (Railton & Watson, 2011); its influence on auteur cinema and new digital cinema (Calavita, 2007; Ashby, 2013); the predominant role of the music video in relation to global video-sharing websites, especially YouTube (Edmond, 2012; Vernallis, 2013; Korsgaard, 2019); its digital and post-media aesthetics (Shaviro, 2017); its multimedia transformation into video games and tablet and smartphone apps (Korsgaard, 2013; 2017); or the continual exploration of both extant and new analytical methodologies (Burns & Hawkins, 2019). 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI 113 Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard ♦ Music Video in Transformation However, even as the tradition of research on music video continues to grow, there are still many areas within the field that are left uncharted. Carrying as its title, The Music Video in Transformation, this special issue of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image comprises a range of articles that follow some new avenues in the study of music video. To account for all of the extensive changes in the production, distribution, and reception of music videos is obviously more than can be accomplished in a single journal issue. But by the combined efforts of names that are either well established or on the rise within music video scholarship, this special issue attends to at least some of these recent transformations of the music video, noting how it has become a highly popular laboratory of digital innovations and new media experiments reaching an ever-growing audience. While Straw’s account is unmistakably funereal, rather than burying the contemporary music video, the conceptual thrust of the present issue is to celebrate the anniversary of this ever-transforming media configu- ration which is both morphing and confusingly multifaceted. Yet both the birthday party programme and the guest list seem quite diverse, for the hosts are actually two. The first one, which saw the light of day when MTV started to broadcast on 1 August 1981, and which, as a genuine newborn, flooded the TV screens of the Western world twenty-four hours a day, is now enjoying a productive age of thirty-eight, when the verve and horizon of the future possibilities take over any lurking nostalgia. Launched into the world by YouTube in the summer of 2005, the second host is fourteen years old and acts as could be expected from its age: with an adolescent narcissism, internally torn apart. Whereas the younger descendant crops up everywhere, changing the masks, disguises, and rooms, its television predecessor, despite its young age, has long ago come to terms with its role as a media relic, having already witnessed its own death – and not just once but twice. One of these deaths occurred in the second half of the 1990s when MTV gradually ceased to broadcast 3 For valuable insights music videos, suggesting that the days of music video were numbered.3 on histories of MTV see But even before that, however, death made its appearance only shortly Tannenbaum & Marks (2011); and Austerlitz after the music video’s televisual birth, in the decade inaugurating an era (2007, pp.31–64). which is usually – and with a hardly unhearable elegiac tone – referred to as a ‘post-media condition’, an era in which any notion of medium specificity dissolves in favour of the new media hybridity. Although the discourse of post-mediality fully emerges only at the turn of the twenty-first century in relation to the dissolution of the traditional media as well as of their circulation and reception practices, it is as early as 1990 that Félix Guattari announces the beginning of the post-media era, hailing it as a fundamental transformation of the mass 114 13:2 Autumn 19 MSMI Tomáš Jirsa and Mathias Bonde Korsgaard ♦ Music Video in Transformation media power, one that would overcome the contemporary adherence to the subjectivity while launching the new phase of interactive usage of information, communication, and artistic technologies (2013, pp.26–27). Such optimistic forecasts are nonetheless quickly shadowed by a tone of mourning over the progressive decline of the classical cinema, which was, as Vinzenz Hediger and Miriam De Rosa remind us, caused by the gradual crisis of its founding triad comprising the canon of auteur cinema, the photographic indexicality and the dispositif of cinema (2016, pp.13–14).