BiblioVault - Books about Music videos

Dancing In The Distraction Factory

Music Television and Popular Culture

Andrew Goodwin

University of Minnesota Press, 1992

Cultural Studies

“Entertaining proof that good sense means good theory, this book is the first to treat music TV as vision and sound. Academically, I had most fun applauding Andrew Goodwin’s elegant skewering of postmodernists; as a rock fan I was constantly startled by Goodwin’s exposes of my most deeply held prejudices. I’m now convinced; there’s much more to MTV than meets the eye.”Simon FrithThe John Logie Baird Centre“Dancing in the Distraction Factory is the best study of MTV I have read. At a time when many critics dismiss music videos either as advertisements for interchangeable commodities or as tiny, soundless movies, Goodwin manages both to analyze the business components of this new medium and also to take videos seriously as complex cultural texts involving music, visuals, stars, and much else. Dancing in the Distraction Factory is a smart book; it will have an impact on the debates surrounding popular culture, and also offers a great deal that will interest the pop music fan.”Susan McClaryMcGill University

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Digital Music Videos

Shaviro, Steven

Rutgers University Press, 2017

Music videos today sample and rework a century’s worth of movies and other pop culture artifacts to offer a plethora of visions and sounds that we have never encountered before.

As these videos have proliferated online, they have become more widely accessible than ever before. In Digital Music Videos, Steven Shaviro examines the ways that music videos interact with and change older media like movies and gallery art; the use of technologies like compositing, motion control, morphing software, and other digital special effects in order to create a new organization of time and space; how artists use music videos to project their personas; and how less well known musicians use music videos to extend their range and attract attention.

Surveying a wide range of music videos, Shaviro highlights some of their most striking innovations while illustrating how these videos are creating a whole new digital world for the music industry.

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The Media Swirl

Politics, Audiovisuality, and Aesthetics

Carol Vernallis

Duke University Press, 2023

From fan-generated content on TikTok to music videos, the contemporary media landscape is becoming ever more vast, spectacular, and intense. In The Media Swirl Carol Vernallis examines short-form audiovisual media—Beyoncé’s Lemonade, brief sequences from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, TikTok challenges, YouTube mashups, commercials, and many other examples—to offer ways of understanding digital media. She analyzes music videos by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, and others to outline how sound and image enhance each other and shape a viewer’s mood. Responding to today’s political-media landscape through discussions of Fox News and Presidential inaugurations, Vernallis shows how a media literacy that exceeds newscasts and campaign advertising is central to engaging with the democratic commons. Forays into industry studies, neuroscience, and ethics also inform her readings. By creating our own content and knowing what corporations, the wealthy, and the government do through media, Vernallis contends, we can create a more just world.

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Medium Cool

Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones

Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton, eds.

Duke University Press, 2007

Music videos are available on more channels, in more formats, and in more countries than ever before. While MTV—the network that introduced music video to most viewers—is moving away from music video programming, other media developments signal the longevity and dynamism of the form. Among these are the proliferation of niche-based cable and satellite channels, the globalization of music video production and programming, and the availability of videos not just on television but also via cell phones, DVDs, enhanced CDs, PDAs, and the Internet. In the context of this transformed media landscape, Medium Cool showcases a new generation of scholarship on music video. Scholars of film, media, and music revisit and revise existing research as they provide historically and theoretically expansive new perspectives on music video as a cultural form.

The essays take on a range of topics, including questions of authenticity, the tension between high-art influences and mass-cultural appeal, the prehistory of music video, and the production and dissemination of music videos outside the United States. Among the thirteen essays are a consideration of how the rapper Jay-Z uses music video as the primary site for performing, solidifying, and discarding his various personas; an examination of the recent emergence of indigenous music video production in Papua New Guinea; and an analysis of the cultural issues being negotiated within Finland’s developing music video industry. Contributors explore precursors to contemporary music videos, including 1950s music television programs such as American Bandstand, Elvis’s internationally broadcast 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert, and different types of short musical films that could be viewed in “musical jukeboxes” of the 1940s and 1960s. Whether theorizing music video in connection to postmodernism or rethinking the relation between sound and the visual image, the essays in Medium Cool reveal music video as rich terrain for further scholarly investigation.

Contributors. Roger Beebe, Norma Coates, Kay Dickinson, Cynthia Fuchs, Philip Hayward, Amy Herzog, Antti-Ville Kärjä, Melissa McCartney, Jason Middleton, Lisa Parks, Kip Pegley, Maureen Turim, Carol Vernallis, Warren Zanes

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Millennials Killed the Video Star

MTV's Transition to Reality Programming

Amanda Ann Klein

Duke University Press, 2021

Between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. As an alternative to the twenty-four-hour video jukebox the channel had offered during its early years, MTV created an original cycle of scripted reality shows, including Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, Catfish, and Jersey Shore, which were aimed at predominantly white youth audiences. In Millennials Killed the Video Star Amanda Ann Klein examines the historical, cultural, and industrial factors leading to MTV's shift away from music videos to reality programming in the early 2000s and 2010s. Drawing on interviews with industry workers from programs such as The Real World and Teen Mom, Klein demonstrates how MTV generated a coherent discourse on youth and identity by intentionally leveraging stereotypes about race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Klein explores how this production cycle, which showcased a variety of ways of being in the world, has played a role in identity construction in contemporary youth culture—ultimately shaping the ways in which Millennial audiences of the 2000s thought about, talked about, and embraced a variety of identities.

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