Full Description
Music videos play a critical role in our age of ubiquitous streaming digital media. They project the personas and visions of musical artists; they stand at the cutting edge of developments in popular culture; and they fuse and revise multiple frames of reference, from dance to high fashion to cult movies and television shows to Internet memes. Above all, music videos are laboratories for experimenting with new forms of audiovisual expression.
The Rhythm Image explores all these dimensions. The book analyzes, in depth, recent music videos for artists ranging from pop superstar The Weeknd to independent women artists like FKA twigs and Dawn Richard. The music videos discussed in this book all treat the traditional themes of popular music: sex and romance, money and fame, and the lived experiences of race and gender. But they twist these themes in strange and unexpected ways, in order to reflect our entanglement with a digital world of social media, data gathering, and 24/7 demands upon our attention.
Contents
List of Figures
Preface
1. The Rhythm Image
2. Post-Cinematic Articulations of Sound and Vision (Massive Attack)
3. Cyborg Avatars (Dawn Richard)
4. Pulses of Distraction (Tierra Whack)
5. Living With Time-Space Compression (Bonobo)
6. The Passion According to FKA twigs
7. Vanishing Voices (Moses Sumney)
8. Metamorphoses of a Severed Head (The Weeknd)
9. Submerged (Tkay Maidza)
Afterword
Books and Articles Cited
Music and Videos Cited
Index
