Dissertation: The Evolution of the Music Video PDF

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The Evolution of the Music Video: has the music video been elevated to an art form or is it still intrinsically a marketing tool?...

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Student Number: 281607

The Evolution of the Music Video: has the music video been elevated to an art form or is it still intrinsically a marketing tool?

Name: William Widnell Date: Friday 11th May 2018 Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Film & Screen Studies Writing, Film & Digital Creativity College of Liberal Arts Bath Spa University

Abstract In this piece I will explore whether the music video has been elevated to an art form in and of itself, or whether it is still intrinsically a marketing tool. I will summarise and critically evaluate the academic histories of the medium: looking at how the format came in to existence, particularly during the MTV era. Furthermore, I will apply key academic texts on the music video itself, as well as key readings on postmodern cultural studies, including: Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Arnold et. al., 2017) and Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson, 1991). Having considered histories and writings surrounding the medium, I will analyse the cinematic and artistic credentials of the music video looking particularly at narrative and the role of the auteur. This will include looking at key texts such as Experiencing the Music Video (Vernallis, 2004) and Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (Beebe and Middleton, 2007). Then I will bring all of this into a modern day context, looking at how the music video exists today in a new digital age and how the medium is evolving in to new forms. Finally, as a case study I will provide a full-depth analysis of the work of Tyler, the Creator; assessing his music videos as works of art. The dissertation concludes by arguing that although commerce still plays an integral part in the production and distribution of the music video, there is still simultaneously room for art to flourish within the medium.

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Acknowledgements Firstly I would like to thank Bath Spa University for the fantastic teaching I have received over the last three years. In particular I would like to thank Steve Manley for tutoring me for this dissertation, as well as Jamie Steele, Suman Ghosh and Claire Levy for keeping me interested and engaged with film studies throughout my time here. Secondly, I would like to thank Devonport High School for Boys and in particular Julie Wilkinson for allowing me to realise my interest in film studies. I would also like to thank Tyler, the Creator for inspiring me to make the choices that has got me to this position. Lastly, I would like to thank my parents and my brothers for shaping me in to the person I am today.

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Contents Introduction"

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Histories, Writings and Form"

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Cinematic Credentials: Narrative and the Rise of The Auteur"

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Music Video Today: New Forms & Tyler, the Creator"

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Fig. 1 - ‘The Wolf Hayley Signature Style’"

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Conclusion"

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Bibliography"

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Videography"

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Introduction In this highly commercial world that we live in there begs the age old question: art or commerce? Gone are the days of the poor suffering artist (although many still do take this path), as highly lucrative creative industries have established themselves within our culture, allowing artists to get paid significant amounts of money to do what they love. This however comes at a cost; the art that is produced becomes commodified and thus has to be suited to certain types of markets in order to get a steady return on investment, and in turn often the art suffers and becomes too commercialised. Two creative industries that have risen above any other are film and music; over the last century they have dominated popular culture and been seen and heard by the masses. Therefore, it would be fitting to assess the artistic and commercial worth of a medium where both film and music collide: the music video. Being born in the late 1990s it is easy for me to overlook how the music video came to be; playing a significant role in shaping popular culture since way before my birth, it is almost as if it just appeared as a fully fledged medium, however, it has spent a great deal of its existence finding its feet. Furthermore, it is regarded as one of the dominant mediums of the postmodern era and thus the subject to a whole host of writings including key works from Frederic Jameson (1991), Simon Frith (1993), Caroline Vernallis (2004) and Roger Beebe and James Middleton (2007). Now as we have entered the new digital age, the music video has been given new grounds to flourish beyond its restrictive MTV days, with the medium being taken to new artistic heights. So, has the music video reached the point of an art form in and of itself, or will it never escape its highly commercial past?

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Histories, Writings and Form In August 1981, MTV debuted on television screens and quickly became one of the dominant methods for the promotion and circulation of popular music. During this paradigm shift, radio lost its primacy in the commercial and cultural distribution of music and in dramatic fashion was even expected to perish. Furthermore, it was also speculated that even live performance would be made redundant. The arrival of this new audiovisual format would, in turn, call for the reinvention of music distribution and could even be considered its sole life-support. The industry was left with no other option than to increasingly relocate popular music into the domain of the visual, otherwise, it was thought that popular music would not continue to exist as a vital part of popular culture (Arnold, 2017:2). As a sub-genre of short filmmaking, the medium brought a new life to pop music and storytelling. The music video is completely freed from the chains of the full narrative film’s requirements to follow a seamless chronological plot - subordinating the characteristics of substance in favour of an emphasis on style and aura, and driven by the cinematic language of montage as a creative method of communication. This postmodern aspect of ‘style over substance’ has made this medium a captivating form, with the ability to pack a great deal of emotion and awe in to a very brief period of time. Once music videos had come of age there was a blurring of lines between them and advertisements; a lot of techniques were thrown back and forth between both forms, with each inspiring the other. The lines became even more blurred when mainstream filmmaking got involved: the off-the-wall aesthetic of the music video became the predominant means of communication of American life in practically every visual medium, portraying every music video viewers’ fantasies. Music’s biggest stars such as Michael Jackson and Madonna 5  of 45

starred in video-like advertisements for big corporations. Likewise there was a rise of commercially trained directors in Hollywood with the likes of David Fincher and Ridley Scott coming to prominence. This meant that music videos once-unique style had become a fundamental part of mainstream media (Austerlitz 2007:4). Early writing on the music video seemed to be situated in a somewhat grey area between music or sound and the visual. Where as it was very much analysed in visual terms, relating more to film studies, in E. Anne Kaplan’s noteworthy Rocking Around the Clock (1990). On the other side of the spectrum, Andrew Goodwin took a more music-centred approach, one that led to the book Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader (1993) which Goodwin produced with Simon Frith and Lawrence Grossberg. However, these early works on music video seemed to be preoccupied by the cultural impact of the MTVera as well as the concept of postmodernism, that were current during the time of these writings. Looking back, the music video seems to be rather adept at shape-shifting and an integral part of media change; able to shed its commercial skin as a soulless MTV product and blossom in to its more diverse, yet no less ambiguous existence we know today (Arnold, G et. al., 2017:3). Furthermore, throughout its history and to the present day, the music video has also stood in a kind of purgatory between the world of late consumer capitalism: incorporating the fields of celebrity and cultural studies, and the world of art, taking in to account everything from the histories of avant-garde filmmaking to the present rise of digital integration and the world wide web. This gives a rise to the postmodern debates about distinguishing high art from low culture in a reasonably new digital context. This has been a recurring theme in key readings on music videos ever since the early 2000s, texts that include!Caroline Vernallis' Experiencing the Music Video 6  of 45

(2004),!Bebe and Middleton's Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (2007), and more recently Arnold, Cookney, Fairclough and Goddard's Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (2017). Over most of those years however, the modes of digital production and distribution have advanced tremendously, reinventing the idea of what the music video is and shedding new light on its histories. When discussing the artistic worth of the music video it is almost impossible to go without bringing up its deep rooted ties with postmodernism. Frederic Jameson is one theorist that is highly critical of this era of postmodernism and ‘late capitalism’ (Jameson 1991:xix), viewing it as this soulless dystopia, almost incapable of producing ‘political or critical art’ (Jameson 1991:9). He compares and contrasts the postmodern condition to the modernist one that preceded it; whereas modernism was ‘still minimally and tendentially the critique of the commodity and the effort to make it transcend itself,’ postmodernism ‘is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process’ (Jameson 1991:x). According to Jameson our postmodern society has altered history into a succession of hollow stylisations that can be commodified and consumed on a mass scale: ‘the producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture.’ (Jameson, 1991:18) The act of taking from this ‘imaginary museum’ he refers to as pastiche or ‘blank parody’, as, unlike parody, pastiche does not take from the past for satirical reasons but instead as a celebration of what came before. This evident victory of commodification over all domains of life highlights postmodernity’s dependence on what Jameson calls the 7  of 45

‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ (Jameson 1991:1). Jameson goes on to identify a number of cultural manifestations that he associated with the postmodern situation, which include: the blurring of lines between ‘high’ modernist culture and ‘low’ commercial culture; and the inherent trait of ‘style over substance’ that Jameson describes as ‘a new depthlessness’ (Jameson 1991: 3-6). To take things further, Jameson brings up the term ‘mediatization’, in which he points to the process in which the the traditional fine arts are ‘mediatized’: ‘they now come to consciousness of themselves as various media within a mediator system in which their own internal production also constitutes a symbolic message and the taking of a position on the status of the medium in question.’ (Jameson in Bolter & Grusin 2000:56) While this is an apparent symptom of postmodern culture, it nonetheless demonstrates a position toward mediation that has deep roots within the history of Western representation. This is even something Jameson discusses, stating that while ‘mediation of culture’ is now everywhere it could well have been that is was ‘always the case throughout human history (Jameson in Bolter & Grusin 2000:56-57). Michel de Certeau has also suggested that ‘everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others’ (de Certeau in Arnold, G et. al., 2017:6); the same could be said for the music video, borrowing both its visual language and its actual significance from a number of different disciplinaries. Still though, Jameson persists in calling out the current mediatisation of our current culture; he argues that the video, in which he proclaims as the dominant medium of the postmodern age, ‘depends on and disrupts literary and

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linguistic theory’ (Jameson in Bolter & Grusin 2000:57). There is little doubt that the music video is a direct product of postmodernity and the cultural manifestations that Jameson discusses; the music video is symptomatic of this notion of pastiche and the coming together of familiar styles from previous eras, and this is inherently down to the capitalist society we live in. The heavy use of pastiche, while it serves many functions, helps to maintain the video’s ability to commodify an artist’s image for the audience; musicians more often than not maintain their commercial success by constantly changing and renewing their image.

The Revenant (2015)

Migos “T-Shirt” (2017)

As a highly intertextual form, there is nothing the music video takes more from than the Hollywood movie, with recent examples including Revenant (2016) in Migos’ “T-Shirt” and Flashdance (1983) in Kanye West’s “Fade.” The non-stop borrowing could be considered laziness, however it provides the viewer with an instant link to other forms of pop-culture and allows the viewer to consume the video with very little explanation (Austerlitz 2007:8). Later on we will delve deeper in to this idea of pastiche within music videos, with particular reference to auteurism, looking in particular at two prominent directors: Spike Jonze and Hype Williams. Despite the constant borrowings from other mediums, which could be considered unartistic, the music video also remains a breeding ground for 9  of 45

experimentation and innovation within visual production. The medium is a space for not only the musical performers to express themselves but also for the director to develop their own style; every video a chance to provide the audience with a new aspect of the musician’s identity and for the director to add their own signature. Essentially there are three key components that make up a video: the concept, the performer and the director. In order for the video to be successful the performer and director must enter a harmonious relationship, one that can be compared to that of an architect and a client: ‘One supplies the need and the money, one supplies the technical know-how, and either or both provide the germ of the idea… The architect may have the idea for what type of house he would like to build, but it is ultimately the client who must live there.’ (Austerlitz, 2007:8) Therefore, using this analogy, it is down to the music video director to craft an original home for the musician’s song to live in. Both parties must be open-minded when entering the creation process in order for ideas to arise; the director will almost certainly have their own auteur-esque aesthetic that they bring to all of their videos, while at the same time performers must carry over their already established visual personae. Nonetheless, compared to the feature length film, the performer in a music video will tend to play a more notable role in the production of the piece than that of the actor, as it is their name that is predominantly tied to the final product (Austerlitz, 2007:8-9). Nowadays, however, there are now musical performers that direct their music videos such as Tyler, the Creator, who we will be looking at in further detail by analysing his body of work. The fusion of performer/director roles obviously makes the whole creative process more clear and

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defined for the artist; a performer/director has full control on how to create the visual realms for their song to exist in, where as previously the control was shared between two creative minds. Despite working well as a medium for visualising musicians’ songs, the intrinsic value of the music video has been problematic and the subject of controversy ever since the genre has been in existence. As the music video emerged into the mainstream, it was thought by many that it would bring with it a host of issues: from the compromise of any artistic worth within popular music to the abolition of its authenticity. Yet today the cultural significance of the fusion of music and the moving image is gradually being recognised in the arising field of contemporary audiovisual studies. ‘At one time we knew what a music video was but no longer […] We used to define music videos as products of record companies in which images were put to recorded pop songs in order to sell songs but no longer.’ (Vernallis in Arnold, G et. al., 2017) These days the music video encompasses practices from high art video to worldwide popular culture. Placing it more within this notion of ‘audiovisuology’ has the potential to completely change the way we think about music videos, even in its ‘classical’ form from the MTV era. The rise of digital media and the internet has definitely had a significant impact on the music video beyond its analogue roots: YouTube presents us with a vast online archive of many of the long-forgotten music videos of the last 30 years or so; and furthermore it has allowed for the democratisation of digital media which in turn has resulted in an influx of DIY music videos. This could be considered a return to its early 11  of 45 

origins of cheap special effects that hooked early MTV viewers before record companies exploited the medium (Arnold, G et. al., 2017:9). The viral circulation of videos on the internet transcends many of the creative and commercial constraints of the MTV-era and veers more toward the avant-garde form that lived along side it. The relationship between the commercial video and highbrow video has always been rather heated; gallery video artists often took time to distinguish their work from that of the commercial music video. This rings true even for those who were active in both opposing areas such as experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman who went on to direct music videos for The Smiths (Arnold, G et. al., 2017:9). Despite this history of conflict between commercial and highbrow practices, the line distinguishing both has since become blurred in this new digital age, giving reason to consider the music video as an art form rather than solely as a marketing tool. Whether an art form or not, the music video certainly brings image to the forefront of music, rather than being merely a taster of the main event, which could be said for other visual elements within music such as album artwork. The music video therefore could be argued to be evidence of the triumph of image over sound, the view of many academics including Jody Berlan. In her essay “Sound Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction” (1993) Berlan argues that the video ‘present[s] a particular mode of cultural cannibalisation, in which the soundtrack has been digested lifetimes ago, in fact consumed by the image, which appears to be singing.’ (Berlan in Frith, et. al, 1993:37) However, Austerlitz argues back that Berlan’s analysis fails to recognise the fundamental reason that music videos exist in the first place - to accompany and promote its soundtrack and without the soundtrack the music video would be surplus to requirements (Austerlitz, 2007:8). More often than not the song comes first as the 12  of 45 

intention is to encourage people to engage with the music. In turn, the usual method of filmmaking is reversed: with the music being composed first and then later being combined with the accompanying visuals. Therefore, the length of song determines the length of the clip, and so the action on screen is to some extent always subordinate to the the song. Music videos tend to be set in fantasy worlds: from regular, everyday fantasies to intricate representations of other realms; creating a certain visual atmosphere or space that...