COMM333 CHAPTER FIVE: STYLES: WHY I STILL WANT MY MTV : KEVIN WILLIAMS

What is style? Well according to Husserl, for each artist style is the system of equivalences that they make for themselves, which manifests the world they see. It is the universal index of coherent deformation by which they concentrates the still scattered meanings of his perception and makes it exit expressly.
(Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp.54-55; "Why I Still Want My MTV,"pp.91)

Music videos takes videography back to it native state or placement. Music videos are easily recognized because of it's style. Even if the television was muted one could easily recognize a music video because of the certain theatrical choreography that is acted out, and one would see the movement or dancing being displayed that is unlike the display enacted on television shows and movies. The style of a music video is the territory that the music video resides. It is how the video is shot to or with the music and edited to and with the music that gives a music video it's style.

CONCEPTIONS OF STYLE: style has traditionally been conceptualized by historians and just recently been taken up by pop culture through music videos.

-its a categorical tool to put works in a genre

-its an evaluation concept, it can mark quality

-now style can be the latest fashion or trend

MUSIC VIDEO STYLE:

-MTV's style is derived from its strong textual and institutional

-the style of MTV comes from its strong textual institutional ties to advertising.
 -advertising is what runs the music television network.
 -bourgeois consumer capitalism viewings.
-Jhally consider 80s rock video to be the most important development in the realism of pop culture.
 -"music videos are it's own phenomenon"-Kevin Williams
-music videos are interpreted in theoretical languages of feminism, structuralism, marxism, and postmodernist structuralism. In some cases psychoanalytical studies are done on music videos

DIMENSIONS OF MUSIC VIDEOS(VISUAL & MUSICAL)
-tone
-timbre
-harmony
-modulation
-dissonance

The visual things seen in the music videos are interconnected and interrelated with the musical and aural presentation.
 -Slusser said that the aesthetics of a music video is fertile and segmented

Foreshadow of a major thesis in this book:
"When im writing lyrics i use the words like colors. I use words for the sounding of the words, not the actual meaning"(Morse, 1996, p. 124)

Perception never finishes and may be recognized as a mode of communication that constitutes and inaugurates its object.

Musical-visuality is the mutual interpretation of sign and sound. The cultural compositions and significants are revealed in the musical vision of the culture when the material presentation of music videos are seen as patterned lyrical ronal rhythmic presentation of sight and sound.

To the viewers and producers of "meaning" style is the allusive logic of the world."(Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 57)

Style is an expression of a relationship among body, technology, and the world. At the moment when a person perceives the world a style is created because embodiment is a style of the world.

EXAMPLES OF STYLE IN HUMAN EFFORTS TO CAPTURE A SENSE OF THE WORLD.
-Cave paintings(Gebser, 1991)
-Confucist expressive art virtues(Dawson, 1932)
-Toaist art expressing perpetual change(Watts, 1975)
-Ancient Egyptian art(Gebser, 1991)
-Myths expresses it self through human storytelling narrating human understanding of phenomenons(works of Joseph Campbell)
-Medieval art(Cross, Lamm, Turk, 1982)
Perspectival paintings of the Renaissance expressing an understanding of three-dimensional space(Berger 1972)
-Works of Duchamp and Picasso expressing four-dimensional awareness
-the synesthetic musical visuality of music videos expressing a cross-sensual intercommunication synesthesia(Williams, 1995)

No one styles as the priviledge to present the world as it is.(Singer, 1993, p. 237)

The illusionism of Dutch still life or Renaissance spatial recession are as near to and far from the real as Dali's melting clocks or Arp's free floating forms. Aesthetic communication is possible because the artist and his world engage in a mutual exchange of significance. (Singer, 1993, p239)

Style appears as a thoroughgoing transformation pf the world, which familiar things of the world acquire the power to gather new significances around them. Style establishes a coherent orientation towards the world it portrays. (Singer, 1993, p. 238)

MTV styles differ from the style of other shows and networks because every program has its own style even political campaigns.

Jacopson's Communication Model

Content -> Referential
Message -> Poetic

The principle of similarity underlies poetry; the metrical parallelism of lines, or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast.(Hawkes, 1977, p. 82)

Lyrical interpretation is interpretation with music.(Frith, 1981)

Musical pleasure is not significance but the work of signification.(Frith, 1981, p. 164)

The style itself is quite simply a structure of rhythms, melodies, harmonies, instrumentations and so on, with paradigmatic and syntagmatic dimensions that creates a grammar of expectation. (Frith, 1981)

Signs in rock songs are arbitrary and unmotivated. (Fisk & Hartley, 1978)

New songs built on old forms, and rearrangement of old forms, provide each subsequent generation its own connection with rock. (Chaffee, 1985)

THE NEBULOUS AND INEFFABLE DIMENSION OF MUSIC

-turbulence- the initial idea for the album origination 

-running the human race- devising a pattern of straightness and parelles to utilize all possible ingredients as we try to learn about more phenomenons. 

novalis- we are part of a massive system

Turbulence of water:

-wave motion, strange attractors, fractal unfoldings, butterfly effects

Turbulence of sound and music:

-musical time, sound space, timbre and harmonics, resonance, reverbs and echos

"The shape of human life is much more closely mirrored in music than in quiescent two-dimensional surface of a picture." (Kevin Williams, 2003, p. 224)