COMM 333
MUSIC VIDEO
Raphael Bropleh
Chapter 6
With the sense of sight the idea communicates the emotion. Whereas with sound, the emotion communicates the idea, which is more direct and therefore more powerful. (Alfred North Whitehead, cited in Price, 1954, p. 188)
The most exciting moment is the moment when I add the sound… [Then] I tremble. (film director Akira Kurosawa, cited in Alten, 1994, p. 4)
“The popularity of music videos has to be located in a larger context in which visual media and images are competing with each other if they are not displacing music and aural images as the site of salvation and transcending in rock culture”
(Grossberg, 1993, p. 186)
In 1988 Ewen argued in various ways that understanding the rhetoric of television and videos is largely a matter of understanding the visual presentation and visual imagery.
Television in visual terms is related to a wider interpretive framework and relates to a wider culture predilection to favor the sense of sight. A phrase like “I see what you mean” reveals the significance of this visual bias because “seeing” is tied to “knowing.”
When discussing music video and television the term imagery almost always refers to visual imagery. Example, early fears of the effects of music videos on rock music revolved around the notion that image would become more important than the music itself and that visual and narrative interpretations of the songs would diminish the interpretive liberty of the specific listeners. (Straw, 1993)
It is important to keep in memory that imagery may be visual, but the audial, haptic, tactile, and so on. It is also important to remember that rock music has always been about images (Grossberg, 1989), and this was founded on the encompassing historical critique of Heidegger
Critics claim that visual imagery is replacing logic and rationality as the dominant communication mode of popular and political culture. (Collins, 1989)
I, Raphael Bropleh, don’t believe that the visual imagery is replacing logic and rationality as the dominant communicating because this theory is only true depending on the viewer.
Vision has stood in for all the senses since Aristotle who in the introduction to Metaphysics wrote that sight is the keenest of the senses.
The proliferation of visual imagery from movies to street signs has lead many to consider the current echoes as the visual age. The central concern to contemporary media criticism of critics is the communicative force, the prevalence, and the impact of visual imagery. (Collins, 1989)
Heidegger suggested that the shift of from classical to modernism thoughts can be understood as a shift from speech and oral discourse as the logos of communication to logic and written discourse as the logos of communication. Now the discourse has changed from logic and written to electronic and imagery.
Imagery has become bias of our daily decisions and expectations of true and false facts and fiction where the reader can question the relative validity of statements because the grammar is understood. However in music videos there is no relative validity of true and false statements.
According to Meyorwitz and Leonard, claims that news, situation comedies, commercials and so on, generally maintain a strong relation to print models:
-they can be summarized.
-they are generally clear and specific in terms of content
-they stress clarity of meaning
Zettl’s Levels of media messages:
- light and color
- two-dimensional spaces(height & width)
- three-dimensional space(implied depth)
- time and motion
- sound
Influence of cognitive and effective mental maps on perception
a. analysis of genre
b. accuracy of news
c. dealing with advertising and internet information
Intellectual and cultural frameworks for media production
a. content analysis
b. semiotic analysis
c. Marxist criticism
d. Feminist criticism
e. Psychoanalytic criticism
f. Sociological analysis
Chapter 7
The second order simulation simplifies the problem by the absorption of the appearance, or by the liquidation of the real, whichever. It establishes in any cases a reality, images echo, appearances: such is certainly work, the machine, the systems of industrial production in its entirety, in that it is radically opposed to the principle of theatrical illusion. No more resemblance or lack of resemblance, or God or human being, but an imminent logic of the logic of the operational principle. (Baudrillard, 1983)
“Power, too, for some time now produces nothing but signs of its resemblance. And at the same time, another figure of power comes into play: that of a collective demand for signs of power—a holy union which forms around the disappearance of power. Everybody belongs to it more or less in fear of the collapse of the political. And in the end the game of power comes down to nothing more than the critical obsession with power—an obsession with its death, an obsession with it, survival, the greater the more it disappears. When it has totally disappeared, logically we will be under the total spell of power—a haunting memory already foreshadowed everywhere, manifesting at one and the same time the compulsion to get rid of it (nobody wants it any more, everybody unloads it on others) and the apprehensive pining over its loss... [Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, trans. New York: Semiotest]
Music video is not an invention of MTV, it has predecessors in earlier television, film, and video.
The performer of a music video is not just a musician, a dancer, a singer, or an actor, but they are a persona.
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