Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context |
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Author: Heidi Peeters Carol Vernalis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context |
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Will Carol Vernallis's Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context become an important work in the music video theory canon? Probably so, but unfortunately it will be so for the wrong reasons. Considering the fact that the theoretical music video canon is underdeveloped to such an extent that undergraduates' interest in the medium is far greater than the available teaching materials, almost any monograph on the subject will probably be hailed as a new gospel in visual studies, cultural studies and television studies departments alike. Experiencing Music Video nevertheless fails to offer what its title promises and likewise fails to overcome the temporal and theoretical gap that has emerged since Andrew Goodwin's 1992 publication of Dancing in the Distraction Factory . Instead of providing an insightful investigation into the poetics of the medium and into the cognitive and emotional responses generated in the audience, this study reduces the medium to its musical structures - an aspect that had already been dealt with accurately by Goodwin himself. Through its narrowed down focus, Experiencing Music Video is unable to rise above the level of fragmentary descriptions and theoretical freewheeling into the platitudes of film theory. It thus fails to satisfyingly dissect the medium of music videos and to integrate the phenomenon within a larger theoretical, mediatic and cultural context.
The book is split up into two parts, containing theory and case-studies respectively. The theoretical part is divided into chapters on the basis of the structural aspects of music video, such as "Editing", "Actors", "Settings", "Lyrics", "Musical Parameters", eventually linking these together in "Connections Among Music, Image and Lyrics" in order to obtain an "Analytical Method". The case study part provides three analyses of music videos: Peter Gabriel's "Mercy Saint", Madonna's "Cherish" and Prince's "Get Off.." The work is presented in an attractive layout and completed with illustrative frame-stills.
As attractive and orderly as the layout and the table of contents might seem, as chaotic and fragmentary is the internal theoretical development of Vernallis's argument. The haphazardness results from two contradictory impulses. One first impulse is the author's fear of Grand Theory, pushing her towards a bottom-up approach in order to "lay out the basic materials of music video, such as David Bordwell and his colleagues do for cinema in The Classical Hollywood Cinema of Film Art ." (p. 285) Nevertheless, whereas Bordwell works as an archeologist, unraveling film's structural mechanisms in order to lay bare the creation of a coherent narrative and experiential universe, Vernallis has no experiential ground of departure, nor has she any archeological intentions. Her bottom-up approach reaches no further than the surface of the music video, as she does not search for an overall Gestalt or a universe that might be inside the shell of images and sounds.
A second impulse, contradictory to the first, is the author's personal agenda. With an M.A. in musical studies and with working experience of putting music to film, Vernallis is a highly biased watcher to whom music videos are all about finding "visual correlates to sound." (p. 101). Foam on the waves in Madonna's Cherish to Vernallis clearly constitutes a "microrhythm against the broad plain of the beach", drawing attention to "slight imperfections in the timbres of the song", in order to "naturalize the amateurish singing of Madonna."(p.180) Although her musical agenda blurs the mediatic difference between music videos and visuals, the author posits her own synaesthetic and idiosyncratic conception of music video as the only legitimate basis for both experience and analysis. She even admonishes her students when they do otherwise: "When my students write music-video analyses without much coaching, or after they have been snoozing during lectures, they will gravitate -as students do- to what feels most familiar, and they will write about music videos as if they were silent movies, with the visual images signifying the full regalia." (p 185). That the majority of the music-video audience indeed have never attended any of her lectures and that their experiences will likewise gravitate towards what feels "most familiar" is cunningly ignored. The top-down imposition of a musical dominant is contradictory to the bottom-up approach necessary to escape the traps of Grand Theory, since it blocks off theoretical openness. In this way Vernallis is doomed to spiral through an associative series of scattered theoretical fragments from different domains, returning to the same dogmas over and over again.
Vernallis is able to sustain her way of working, because she has no representative and limited corpus, but simply takes all music videos as her working ground. Without an objective method to delineate the corpus, anything goes and theory is exposed to the arbitrary preferences of the analyst, as there will always be a music video to substantiate no matter which claim about the medium. The sensation of arbitrariness is intensified by the fact that the music video fragments that are used to exemplify the theoretical claims of the author are presented in isolation from their thematic and narrative context, so that a thorough knowledge of the material is needed in order to verify the author's claims.
Apart from the structural and theoretical flaws, the book regularly contains irritating inaccuracies that destabilize the theoretical claims even further: The Smashing Pumpkins' song title Bullet with Butterfly Wings is misquoted as Bullet for Butterfly (p. 99) and No Doubt's Don't Speak , contrary to Vernallis's assertion, at no point contains the line "You and Me Together." (p.134) Worse is the misquotation of Alanis Morisette's Ironic , since it serves to substantiate the author's claims about the function of lyrics in music videos. The line:" a man who has too many spoons, but no wife," is taken to be an example of how the song is "written with wit as well as flow and rhyme." Actually, the text goes:" It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife. It's meeting the man of my dreams, and then meeting his beautiful wife."
When Vernallis does provide thematic and narrative analyses, these are often highly idiosyncratic and bizarre to say the least. A case in point is the analysis of Radiohead's "Karma Police," of which Vernallis states that: "The Chorus of the song recalls The Beatles's songwriting (…) The video was filmed in the back seat of a '60s Chevy traveling a dirty road at night, somewhere in the Southwest. (…) However, there is a conflict among the song's pop songwriting values, the desert setting, and the lyrics' distinctly urban tone. These slight disjunctions create a pleasantly strange effect. Perhaps the video's solitary human figure suggests a hunger for a referent beyond the frame - in this case, John Lennon." (p.95) Why Vernallis turns to The Beatles, even to John Lennon as the "referent beyond the frame" is a mystery, since verse, chorus, lyrics and setting make sense perfectly well together and are no more related to The Beatles than any British alternative song. The clip, like the lyrics, is about an existential "Karma police" that is after sinners.
It is striking that Vernallis systematically makes abstraction of "supernatural" or "abnormal" elements in music video: she for example ignores the fact that in the "Karma Police"-car, there is no one behind the steering wheel and that in "Ironic," there's not only one Alanis Morisette in the car, but one in every seat, although she analyses the video two pages after having discussed the Kuleshov-effect. (p.95) Singers may fly and meet up with mermen, at no point Vernallis seems to consider that such mythical, supernatural elements could have anything to do with the medium itself.
Apart from the lack of a systematic structural, narrative, thematic and cognitive analysis, the work fails to position the medium of music video in a larger economical, sociological, and mediatic context. Again, the author's personal agenda is responsible. We find out that Vernallis actually dislikes the present-day institution of music television, just like she dislikes music videos' commercialism: "When MTV started rolling TRL, with teens talking over the tapes, I almost threw the remote through the set. My favorite institution, The Box (displaying pure music videos, my note), has vanished." (footnote 6, Introduction) "… I wish for works that might be more independent of commercialism - video-art pieces in which music, image and lyrics share a common space and yet where space, experimentation and difference are manifest." (p. 289) Dislike is one thing, ignorance another. By ignoring the institutional and sociological context of the medium, Vernallis is unable to provide the "cultural context" hinted at in title. In this way, the cultural analysis turns out to be nothing but a recital of clichés. Music videos are claimed to present women as passive eye-candy, sexually objectified when black, virginal when white. Afro-American male singers are repressed by rule and thus they have to fight for social justice in their videos, whereas their white counterpart assume power in society: "When an R&B video emphasizes exteriors, the (black) artists are often placed in isolation, not only to speak about social limitations but also to make the artist less threatening. The opposite is true of much (white) alternative rock videos. (…) When alternative videos employ more fanciful or expensive settings, the groups appear to assert white male privilege despite themselves ." (p. 87)
Does all this mean that reading Experiencing Music Video was a complete waste of time and that the book is ready for the garbage trunk? Not entirely. At times, Vernallis surprises with inventive ideas and many analyses will certainly have their merits within production classes, if only because after reading this, students will never again forget to stress the importance of musical structures.
Rather than Experiencing Music Video , the book should better have been named How to Experience Music Video . This publication proves how too strong a fear of Grand Theory can be disastrous for theory as such and reinforce the need for systematic and unbiased theoretical investigations into the field of music video .
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