Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media

About the Author Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College, USA. As a former rock critic for Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, she was an early advocate of the genre now known as grunge. She is the author of Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, (2003), Punk In the Present Tense, (1997) and Exile In Guyville, (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as Rock Crowds And Power. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.Kirsty Fairclough is Associate Dean of Research and Innovation at the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, UK. She is co-editor of Music/Video (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Arena Concert (Bloomsbury, 2015), and The Music Documentary (2013). Product Description This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of “music television”. Review "Music/Video panoramically explores the separate and simultaneous effects of the two media. The collection incisively probes pre-existing critiques, and literally offers re-vision of the music video in challenging expositions with broad historical and cultural inclusivity. This book’s analytical discourses will certainly affect the ways its readers see music." - Mike Alleyne, Professor of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University, USA"What can we learn from music videos? The essays in this brilliant collection move between MTV and YouTube, analog and digital, Bjork's erotics and Bowie's multiple masks, Laibach's televisual subversions and Duran Duran's audiovisual 'transfiguration [from] suburban wannabes to global pop stars.'" - Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA"The strange beast we call “music video” has long since overflowed the contexts and aesthetics first set for it in the era of 1980s MTV. This superbly edited collection expands our understandings of both music and video, and brings to our attention the multiplicity and complexity of their combinations in 20th and 21st century audiovisual cultures." - Adrian Martin, author of Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (2014) and Professor, Monash University, Australia"Music video may well be a promotional device for the music industry, reproducing hegemonic representations of identity, but as this collection of engaging essays shows, alternative visions proliferate in the multiple spaces between high art, low culture, and viral video. Bookended by a historical view on the music video aesthetic, and an assessment of contemporary digital and online music video, the collection offers welcome examples