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This colloquy provides a multi-perspective look at a music video. Though music video is central to our culture today (videos accumulate view counts that surpass the mathematical sublime—Despacito h...

This chapter explains how writers can approach music videos, offering practical strategies for analyzing the formal and narrative elements of music videos and emphasizing the value of collaborative approaches to music video analysis. Music videos on YouTube are how young people most commonly consume popular music. And the genre’s aesthetics are shared with many other forms of moving media, including commercials, YouTube clips, trailers, political ads, and audiovisually intensified segments of post-classical cinema. Music video is dependent on ephemeralities of color, movement, and sound. Like popular music, music video possesses motifs, rhythms, grain, and fine details that carry weight. Music videos as a form often have odd peculiar entailments: background figures, for example, partly because they are mute tend to adopt strange roles. Music video directors like to say that there is no one right setting for a song–there are many possibilities.

This article’s broad aim is to demonstrate how to analyze a music video. I’ll consider several videos by Beyonce as well as a number from music video's history. I’ll show how Beyonce stands as the genre’s fulcrum, both formal innovator and historical guardian. I’ll propose a working definition for the genre, and discuss music video’s technological and socio-economic influences. I’ll highlight some of the genre’s specificities, as well as show how audiovisual relations have changed, and the ways analysis might attend to technology, platform, and musical style.

IntroductionMusic video continually reconfigures and reasserts itself, emerging in new guises. It jumps platforms: from television, cable, DVDs to iTunes and YouTube; from high-gloss looks and extravagant budgets to footage shot on cell phones. Its borders are changing and uncertain. Few directors have stayed in the game through the genre's many shifts. Floria Sigismondi, along with only a handful of others - Hype Williams, Dave Meyers, Sophia Mueller - has been able to reinvent herself throughout music video's transitions.Interviews with music video directors are rare. Until recently there wasn't a venue for them. Academic journals have given little space to scholarship on music video and much less to the directors. This interview with Floria Sigismondi aims to give a sense of her craft and what it's like to work in an industry over a twenty-year period.1This conversation starts near the beginning of her career and takes us to the present. Born to Italian opera singers and raised in a Canadian industrial town, Floria Sigismondi was educated in Catholic girls' schools and received her artistic training at the Ontario College of Art. Her work draws from painting, illustration, sculpture, photography and film. This article will consider six of her videos: 'Little Wonder' for David Bowie (1997), 'Makes Me Wanna Die' for Tricky (1998), 'The Beautiful People' and 'Tourniquet' for Marilyn Manson (1999), 'Hurt' for Christina Aguilera (2006), and 'E.T.' for Katy Perry and Kanye West (2011).2But before we begin the interview, some context may be helpful. Today, participation with the audiovisual is informed by an explosion of platforms, formats and styles; but what lies behind these media changes? I (interviewer, Carol Vernallis) want to argue that music video has been a prime driver of this new media swirl. Music video's role has been under- acknowledged. Today's media relations become malleable and volatile in a 'mixing board' aesthetic, and our accrued knowledge about how to work fluidly with this material is informed by music video. Music video's major contribution to today's audiovisual turn stems from the fact that ways of placing music and image together are learned: they form genealogies. One can't just speed up Godard and put music against it. Today's unique audiovisual relations developed through music video directors' and editors' experiments at reconfiguring images and sounds. From its advent in the 1980s, music video deployed new technologies (cheap, reusable videotape) and was shaped by new commercial and social demands (the impetus to make it fast, creative, musical, different, wild). Subsequently, these changing audiovisual relations of music video have influenced practices in film sound and music; the soundtrack in toto has become 'musicalised': sound effects and dialogue are now shaped alongside composed music into musical phrases. Sonic features can also adopt leading roles, driving the film; or sound can mediate, enabling individual film parameters to come to the fore. The image acquires a sense of speed and flexibility: the image's contents can seem as if they had been poured from one shot into the next. Cutting, too, can bestow an almost percussive rhythmic drive. An image in the new digital cinema often avoids a ground because the sound wafts it along.These audiovisual forms of knowledge were shaped by music video. In the eighties music video was the laboratory: while commercials and films in that era tended toward tightly controlled client-author supervision and careful storyboarding, a music video director or editor might try anything. (Turn the image on its head and abut it with some red.) In the nineties music video directors streaming into cinema helped drive the new, audiovisually intensified, post-classical cinema.3 A second wave then immigrated, as industry funding, in response to free downloading, dried up in the noughties. Music video directors have flourished in the industry because they're especially attuned to the new technologies and the new audiovisual relations. …

“Music video was the most terrific sandbox, where I could try anything.” 1 David Fincher David Fincher, personal interview, October 1998. Lawrence's and Meyers's videos can be seen on the web. A li...

When we become engaged with a music video, what draws us in? What constitutes craft or artistry in the genre? Theorists of music video have usually addressed these questions from the perspective of sociology, film theory or popular cultural studies. Film theory, in particular, has had a tremendous influence on the analysis of music video, because of the two genres' apparently similar structuring of sound and image. But by the criteria of film, music videos tend to come off as failed narratives; the genre's effectiveness eludes explanation. Much has been written about the ways that advertising, film, television sitcoms and newscasts have borrowed from the rhetoric of music video. However, there has yet to be a detailed analysis of any one video, an analysis that can describe how particular moments are set up and departed from and why some moments seem important and others less so.l This absence of close readings results in part from the difficulties associated with analysing music, particularly popular music. Nor are there adequate theories of how music and image might work together to create a hybrid form. The need for such a theory has been emphasised by a number of theorists, including Alf Bjornberg, John Fiske, Dick Hebdige, and Susan McClary. Andrew Goodwin is the most outspoken in his call for a reading that would reflect musical concerns: In the study of music television a number of major lacunae are evident, but underlying many of them is the neglect of the music itself. This deafening silence in the corridors of the academy combines with an overestimation of the power of the visual to disfigure the study of music television. (1992, p. 2) As Goodwin suggests, no one has attempted an analysis that takes musical codes, processes, and techniques as providing means by which video image can be structured. This article attempts to accomplish such goals. It provides both a description of the ways that musical and visual codes operate in a music video, and an indepth analysis that shows these operations at work in a temporal flow. These two modes, one largely taxonomical and the other more processual, work together to inform us about music video as an artistic practice and as an ideological apparatus. If we attend to the particular features of a single video, we can begin to understand how music video works as a distinct medium. It is by attending to these features many of which would be called aesthetic features - that we can learn about music video's modes of representing race, gender, and sexuality. The first section of this

This article appears in the Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. MTV’s launch happened thirty years ago. Since then music video has undergone shifts in technologies and platforms, financial booms and busts, and changing levels of audience engagement. While music videos hit a low point at the start of the millennium, they have reemerged as a key driver of popular culture. This resurgence resembles MTV’s first moment: it’s again worth asking what music video can do and where it fits. A variety of styles, genres, and tropes marks both the eighties and today. The traditional definition of music video - a record-company product that puts images to a pop record in order to sell the song — has become too narrow. Instead we might describe music videos as containing heightened sound/image relations we recognize as such. Today's videos can reflect great technical proficiency. But in the eighties an attempt at an audiovisual connection often left a trace of the performers’ and director’s efforts. This gave videos a special charm. Today’s videos, however, may also reflect a full flowering of the genre. Many directors have labored in the industry and weathered its transitions: their experiences inform today’s music videos. This chapter looks at what this thirty-year history might add up to.