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Music video in its contexts: popular music and post-modernism in the 1980s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Will Straw
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Extract

Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:

(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);

(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.

Type
Research Article
Information
Popular Music , Volume 7 , Issue 3 , October 1988 , pp. 247 - 266
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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