MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #8 /GENRE THEORY #5: Music Video Genres

These are named as the six music video genres: 



None of these can really separated that exactly and strictly, Madonna's Music mixes live action and animation, my video could potentially as well.

1. PERFORMANCE

U2's Beautiful Day
where they go to various locations. 
"Giving their videos a theme" - So this is both a performance and concept video. 



The Strokes's You Only Live Once
The Strokes are a band which nearly only do performance videos.



2. SPECIAL EFFECTS
Chemical Brothers's however that also features dance 

3. STORY
"Where a narrative plays out to the lyrics of the music"
Differentiates between those where the band is in the video and not 

WITH THE ACT


WITHOUT THE ACT
...



4. DANCE
Have other Is still a style of performance.

When does an act stop simple just Performing but also dancing (does Dave Gahan's clapping and moving in I Feel You count as dancing)

A number of Chemical Bro
5. ANIMATION
Just like there are animated films and TV series, there are also animated music videos. Some acts do all of their videos animated, Gorillaz even used it to create different personalities. Some acts do it sometimes like Kasabian, some mix it like Madonna's Music.

And they also tell a story, and have some performance elements.

6. BROWSER
The interactive video that Arcade Fire did?

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #7 - John Stewart

Click here for source:

1. The music video has the aesthetics of a TV commercial, with lots of close-ups and lighting being used to focus on the star’s face.
2. He sees visual reference in music video as coming from a range of sources, although the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography.
3. Stewart’s description of the music video as ‘incorportating, raiding and reconstructing’ is essentially the essence of Intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar, to generate both nostalgic associations and new meanings.

The video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can. The mise-en-scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.

Further presentations by students:

• A Prezi
• From this Slideshare on multiple theorists: 

•The music video has the aesthetics of a TV commercial, with lots of close – ups and lighting being used to focus on the star’s face.
•He sees visual reference in music videos as coming from a range of sources, although the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography.
•Stewart’s description of the music video as ‘incorporating, raiding and reconstructing’ is essentially the essence of intertextuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar, to generate both nostalgic associations and new meaning.
•This video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can. The mise – en – scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an inspirational lifestyle.

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #6 - Dan Miller

(Click here for source)

Floating somewhere between advertisement, video art and short film, the genre is a little tricky to pin down.

Dan Miller challenges that the track dominates the video, so goes against Vernallis's theory:

YouTube views do not necessarily translate into song sales. We should ask ourselves: are all Music Videos made to advertise a song? Music Video is much more than just an advertisement for a popular song – the way we define Music Video has not kept pace with the genre‟s evolution. 

He states we shouldn't ignore:

The abstraction, motion graphics and experimental nature of many music videos - both old and new.

Goes on to link the history of the development of the music video:

*To be added*

The decline of the monopoly of MTV due to digital disruption. (link to Exam Q1a Digital Technology, this gives me more freedom, I am part of the rise of the independent producers)

There has always been a tenuous relationship between Music Videos and record companies. The record company argument is typically “why should we fund something we can‟t directly make any money from?”.... Most unfortunately for the record companies, technological change has brought a solution to their problem they may not like. Better and cheaper home computers, software, sound and video equipment have seen a rise in independent producers who can now create professional-looking and sounding songs and Music Videos without record company money. (That's me!!!!!) 

Software and internet sites like iTunes, launched in 2001 and YouTube, 2005, have had a democratising effect on the digital media industry (MIT, 2010). Music Videos can now turn a profit themselves through advertising-supported models. Severing contracts with record companies, bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails can “finally have a direct relationship with the audience as [they] see fit and appropriate” (Reznor, 2007). Damian Kulash Jr., lead singer of the band Ok Go, highlights that music revenue models are changing and that a large portion of that band‟s income is now generated through sponsorship and advertising in the creation and online viewing of the music videos themselves – as opposed to song sales (2011). In fact, Ok Go „ditched their label‟ after a stoush with them over YouTube embedding rights (Nosowitz, 2010). 

In contrast to the Cambridge definition, it could be argued that some Music Videos are not designed to advertise a song, but to stand as works of art in their own right. As YouTube continues to champion viral media in the form of videos designed to promote themselves, the internet may be killing the TV star and the MTV era may be over. 

That last sentence was a reference to the ironic coincidence(?) that the first music video aired by MTV was "Video Killed The Radio Star", in that case music was being threatened by a visual disruption., and now TV is being threatened by the online digital disruption.

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #4: Sven E Carlsson

From his site 

Audiovisual poetry or Commercial Salad of Images?- Perspective on Music Video Analysis  

Music video is a many-faceted multi-discursive phenomenon. Some generally acknowledged "facts" about music video are that ...

i) music videos communicate through TV-screen and TV-speakers  

ii) music videos are a form of low-brow popular culture  

iii) the reception of music videos depends on the beholder (music video may be beautiful or ugly, art or trash, etc.). 

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #3: Michael Shore

Michael Shore (1984: 98–99) concludes that Music video is

recycled styles … surface without substance … simulated experience … information overload … image and style scavengers … ambivalence … decadence … immediate gratification … vanity and the moment … image assaults and outré folks … the death of content … anesthetizationof violence thorough chic … adolescent male fantasies … speed, power, girls and wealth … album art come to turgid life … classical storytelling’s motifs … soft-core pornography … clichéd imagery … >> more

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #2: Carol Vernallis

POSSIBLE POINTS OF INFLUENCE:

• The referring to an artist's back catalogue, can't put actual clips but want to do it through having some similar characters, like Bowie did in his videos for The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell + Love Is Lost 

Click here to get to her website.

She is of the extreme view that music videos don't have a narrative.

Evaluation of her book:
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0196859904273116?journalCode=jcia

Music Video's Second Aesthetic:

How different is a Lady Gaga video from one by A Flock of Seagulls? MTV’s first broadcast was thirty years ago. Music video has since undergone shifts in technologies, platforms, periods of intense cross-pollination with other media, financial booms and busts, and changing levels of audience engagement. While music videos hit a low point in the 00s as budgets dried up, they have reemerged as a key driver of popular culture.1 Music video’s moment of resurgence resembles MTV’s first moment: there seems to be a question of what music video can do and where it fits.
What does it mean to look back on this thirty-year history? A comparison of the beginnings and the present might show vast differences in performance style, formal conceits, editing, depictions of space, the showcasing of new technologies—or it might not. Might we track the changes from 1979 to 2012? Should we follow the arrivals of new technologies or the migrations to new venues and platforms—from low-res video production in the eighties, to high- gloss 35 millimeter in the nineties, to flexible digital technologies in the 2000’s; from BET, MTV and late-night TV to YouTube, Vimeo and Vevo? We might instead follow the cycles of maturation (in genres like rap and metal), or auteurs’ interests and influence and the ways

...

What is a music video? At one time we knew, but no longer; part of the change has to do with media contexts. In the eighties and nineties, music videos were primarily seen on a few satellite services—like MTV, BET or VHI—or within a countdown on broadcast television late at night, and it was difficult for record companies to get their clips on the air. To make the MTV rotation, clips would first be vetted by a board of ten, and then have to clear the Standards and Practices division. Consciously or unconsciously, directors and artists tailored their work for these committees. Standards and Practices was an especially difficult hurdle, seemingly wielding as much power as the Hays Office in the 50s. Directors and musicians could never predict which constraints would be enforced. For example, no alcohol or product placement was supposed to appear on MTV (unless you were Guns N’ Roses). Some forms of smooching and T&A were okay, others not. Most submissions to the station never aired, and what did possessed a high degree of uniformity, probably resulting from the cat-and-mouse games between censors and directors. Today music video clips are dispersed across a number of commercial websites (Vevo, Hulu, Launch, MTV, Pitchfork), as well as YouTube. There is little vetting of clips. Except for concerns about copyright violations (a constant struggle), prosumers feel free to upload a range of material that confounds genres. For example, many clips with full-frontal nudity remain up even though YouTube viewers can flag them.
We used to define music video as a product of the record company in which images are put to a recorded pop song in order to sell the song. None of this definition holds any more. 

The impact of convergence due to YouTube, one of Web 2.0's most prominent inventions.

On YouTube, individuals as much as record companies post music video clips, and many prosumers have no hope of selling anything. The image can be taken from a variety of sources and a song recorded afterwards: a clip might look like a music video, but the music might be neither prior nor preeminent. In addition, the song might not be a pop song but something similar (ambient, electronic) or very different (jazz or opera). Clips can range from ten seconds to several hours; no longer is there a predictable four-to five-minute format. All sorts of interruption can occur (an insertion of a trailer clip or someone talking), and material from other genres may infiltrate (commercials, sportscasts). Music videos appear in new and unexpected media, interactive games and iPhone apps. A dizzying array of user-based content ranges from vidding and remixes to mashups. It still makes sense to call all these music videos. 

She also brings forward the theory of intertextuality:

Music video has always been self-reflexive, as well as intertextual with nearby forms and genres; think, of course, of the Buggles’ “Music Video Killed the Radio Star,” the video that inaugurated music video’s first broadcast in 1979, and, as the song title suggests, staked its claim against

other media. 

EXAMPLES SHE LISTS:

"Her favourites"
Paula Abdul’s “Rush Rush“ which pays homage to Rebel Without a Cause, 
the Blues Travelers’ “Runaround“ which reenacts The Wizard of Oz. 

As an artist's career gets longer they might refer to their old videos. This can also be done without using former clips, a less direct and evident reference 

But videos today want to say “music video is back!“ and there are many ways it does so. Musicians can place clips of their earlier videos in their clips in a recent one, as if to say “I’m still around.“ “Know your music video history!“ suggests Britney Spears’s “Hold It Against Me“ and Eminem’s and Dr. Dre’s “I Need a Doctor.“ 

The Dancing In The Street video is an archetype for all dance videos, for some audiences it is a simulacrum.

Another way is to intersperse references to other videos, as in Hanson’s 2011 “Thinking Bout Somethin’.“64 The clip plays with speed—characters move a bit too fast or slow, which makes the clip seem very up-to-date, but it’s also filled with a thousand references for those in the know—to Blues Brothers films, West Side Story, Spike Jonze’s and Weezer’s music video “Buddy Holly“ (an homage to the television show Happy Days), a Gap commercial, and every other “dancin’ in the street“ video like the already nostalgic LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem“ and Lionel Ritchie’s “All Night Long.“ It seems jokingly to say, “Hanson was always retro, remember when they did “Mmmbop?“ but we’ll really test your knowledge of retro.“ Many other examples include Katy Perry’s “Friday Night,“ which contains cameos by eighties music video stars Kenny G and Debbie Gibson, and recent YouTube viral web star Karen Black. And Weezer’s “Pork and Beans“ video is a mashup of YouTube one-hit wonders. 

MUSIC VIDEO THEORY #1: Andrew Goodwin

Andrew Goodwin outlined in the first chapter of his Dancing In The Distraction Factory that there are three major themes he approaches when deconstructing music videos:

1. first there is the film studies/television studies approach to the topic, which tends to emphasise the visual
2. second there is the paradigm of postmodernism
3. and third, there is the problem of textual analysis that has lost its necessary connections with the spheres of production and/or consumption.

Throughout the book he layed these down as the defining traits of music video, many label them as six, though this source as seven:

1.     A relationship between lyrics and visuals (visuals either illustrate, amplify or contradict lyrics)
2.    A relationship between music and the visuals (visuals either illustrate, amplify or contradict lyrics)
3.    Particular music styles have their own video style and iconography (such as live stage performance in heavy rock)
4.    A demand on the part of the record company for lots of close ups of the main artist/vocalist
5.    The artist may develop their own star iconography, in and out of the videos, which, over time, becomes part of their star image 
6.    References to voyeurism , particularly in the treatment of women, but also in   terms of looking (screens within screens, binoculars, cameras, etc)
7.    Intertextual references either to music videos, tv or ads

Post from the blog LONGROADMEDIA:

Genre characteristics looked at in genre examples.

PREZIS:
https://de.slideshare.net/FortuneRioba/andrew-goodwin-music-video

Music video the most intertextual media,
Music videos inspired by contemporary art
https://www.archetypes.com/6-amazing-music-videos-inspired-contemporary-art/

DIFFERENT TYPES OF INTERTEXTUALITY

• Social Criticism 
• Self-Reflexive Parody
• Parody
• Pastiche
• Promotion 
• Homage

...

GENRE THEORY #3 - Jason Mittell

Jason Mittell, an professor of American studies and film and media culture, argues that genres: (source: Essay on Cultural Approach To Television Genre Theory )

are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well. 

...To summarize, genres have traditionally been treated as textual components. Although genres are categories of texts, texts themselves do not determine, contain, or produce their own categorization. Generic categories are intertextual and hence operate more broadly than within the bounded realm of a media text. Even though texts certainly bear marks that are typical of genres, these textual conven- tions are not what define the genre. Genres exist only through the creation, circu- lation, and reception of texts within cultural contexts. Textual analysis cannot examine media genres as they operate at the categorical level—there are texts that are categorized by genres, but their textual sum does not equal the whole of the genre. Instead, we must separate the practice of analyzing generically labeled texts from analyzing genre as a cultural category. Analyses of generic texts are certainly worthwhile, but they do not explain how genres themselves operate as categories. We thus need to rethink genres in different terms and propose their analysis using different methods. But what is this new approach? 

From the MANGeR pack:

In short, industries use genre to sell products to audiences. Media producers use familiar codes and conventions that often make cultural references to their audience's knowledge of society + other texts. Genre allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfil a particular pleasure.

This goes well with Barthes's cultural code.

His aforementioned essay goes on to say a lot about music videos in its TV origins/context, looking at Michael Jackson.

GENRE RESEARCH #1 - What Is Genre?

Etymology: 

(/ˈʒɒ̃rə/, /ˈʒɒnrə/ or /ˈdʒɒnrə/; from French genre [ʒɑ̃ʁ(ə)], "kind" or "sort", from Latin genus (stem gener-), Greek γένος, génos) 

Wikipedia defines genre as:

any form or type of communication in any mode (written, spoken, digital, artistic, etc.) with socially-agreed upon conventions developed over time. Genre is most popularly known as a category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria, yet genres can be aesthetic, rhetorical, communicative, or functional. Genres form by conventions that change over time as new genres are invented and the use of old ones is discontinued. Often, works fit into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions. Stand alone texts, works, or pieces of communication may have individual styles, but genres are amalgams of these texts based on agreed upon or socially inferred conventions. Some genres may be rigid with strictly adhered to guidelines while others may be very flexible.
Genre began as an absolute classification system for ancient Greek literature. Poetry, prose, and performance each had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. In later periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings.
Genre suffers from the same ills of any classification system. Genre is to be reassessed and scrutinized and to weigh works on their unique merit. It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the shorthand communication, as well as the tendency of genres to shift with public mores and to reflect the zeitgeist. While the genre of storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes.

Oxford Dictionary 

(Click read more below to see more example sentences from Oxford.)

Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus:

1. kind, category or sort, esp. of literature or artistic work.
2. a) a category of painting in which incidents from everyday life are depicted                  b) (as modifier): genre painting

Dictionary of Media Studies:

A term that refers to a type of media product or a work of art. 

SOME RESOURCES:

• Key Concepts Research into Genre by Wordpress Blogger Rachael

Now for some theorists... soon to come!