No one has sought to trace the history of music video’s influence on audiovisual style and aesthetics-especially as it has changed over those 35 years, and as it has contended with cinema, commercials, and popular music. Music video, as delimited by MTV’s initial launch, is but 35 years old, but it has shape-shifted in response to dramatic technological, aesthetic, institutional, and audience pressures. It resides somewhere between advertising and art. Like popular music, music video possesses motifs, rhythms, grain, and fine details that carry weight. It’s dependent on ephemeralities of color, movement, and sound. Music video’s specialty lies in conveying a brief state of bliss. I’ve written that YouTube can be thought of as a whoopee cushion, and post-classical cinema as a form that puzzles and pummels the viewer. Third, it’s a genre with its own conventions, ways of carrying a narrative, eliciting emotions, deploying performers, settings and props, and conveying space and time.
Second, its aesthetics have seeped into nearly everything moving and visual, from Transformers and Hunger Games to Bollywood, and television shows like Game of Thrones. It’s also the most viewed content on YouTube, with studies showing that music videos are the most common way for audiences to consume popular music, more than through cds, radio, iTunes, or blogs.
PSY’s “Gangnam Style” has 2 billion hits and Justin Bieber’s “Baby” has 1 billion, numbers approaching a mathematical sublime. It’s one of our most popular forms of moving media. The first is its cultural centrality today.
Why should we care about music video? Four reasons, I think. 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. I’ll propose a working definition for the genre, and discuss music video's technological and socio-economic influences. I'll show how Beyoncé stands as the genre's fulcrum, both formal innovator and historical guardian. I'll consider several videos by Beyoncé as well as a number from music video's history. This article's broad aim is to demonstrate how to analyze a music video.
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