Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- 1 Situating Music Video: Between Feminism and Popular Culture
- 2 Genre and Music Video: Configurations and Functions
- 3 Making it Real: Authorship and Authenticity
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Situating Music Video: Between Feminism and Popular Culture
from PART I - TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: The Kleenexes of Popular Culture?
- PART I TOWARDS A CRITICAL VOCABULARY
- 1 Situating Music Video: Between Feminism and Popular Culture
- 2 Genre and Music Video: Configurations and Functions
- 3 Making it Real: Authorship and Authenticity
- PART 2 SEXED, RACED AND GENDERED IDENTITY IN MUSIC VIDEO
- Afterword: Music Video Goes Gaga
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The video for Pink's ‘Stupid Girls’ (2006) is organised around a series of pasquinades of fellow female pop stars and other famous women. Some of these are direct parodies of music videos while others satirise images from popular culture more generally. So, for instance, in one of these vignettes Pink lampoons Jessica Simpson's fetishised performance of car washing in these boots were made for walking (2005) as, dressed only in a skimpy denim miniskirt, bikini top and cowboy boots, she gets (in)appropriately soaked with suds and (over)plays to the camera's voyeuristic gaze. Similarly, a different scenario shows Pink mimicking Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas in both appearance and performance as she dances for the pleasure of a stand-in 50 Cent. Other vignettes, such as references to the notorious Paris Hilton sex tape, parody well-known images of feminine celebrity, while yet others, such as sequences which deal with body-obsessed culture (getting ‘San Tropezed’, vomiting out excess calories, or toning up at the gym), take as their target a more general notion of contemporary idealised young womanhood. Either way, however, the video deploys parody to critique normative definitions of sexualised female identity, that is to say, a culture which equates idealised femininity with ‘stupidity’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Music Video and the Politics of Representation , pp. 17 - 40Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2011