This book is a lively, comprehensive and timely reader on the music video, capitalising on cross-disciplinary research expertise, which represents a substantial academic engagement with the music video, a mediated form and practice that still remains relatively under-explored in a 21st century context. The music video has remained suspended between two distinct poles. On the one hand, the music video as the visual sheen of late capitalism, at the intersection of celebrity studies and postmodernism. On the other hand, the music video as art, looking to a prehistory of avant-garde film-making while perpetually pushing forward the digital frontier with a taste for anarchy, controversy, and the integration of special effects into a form designed to be disseminated across digital platforms. In this way, the music video virally re-engenders debates about high art and low culture. This collection presents a comprehensive account of the music video from a contemporary 21st century perspective. This entails revisiting key moments in the canonical history of the music video, exploring its articulations of sexuality and gender, examining its functioning as a form of artistic expression between music, film and video art, and following the music video's dissemination into the digital domain, considering how digital media and social media have come to re-invent the forms and functions of the music video, well beyond the limits of "music television".
Arnold, Gina: - Gina Arnold is Visiting Professor at the Evergreen State College, USA. As a former rock critic for Rolling Stone, Spin and Entertainment Weekly, she was an early advocate of the genre now known as grunge. She is the author of Route 666: On the Road To Nirvana, (2003), Punk In the Present Tense, (1997) and Exile In Guyville, (Bloomsbury, 2014), as well as Rock Crowds And Power. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature.
Cookney, Daniel: - Daniel Cookney is Senior Lecturer in Creative Digital Design at School of Digital Arts (SODA), Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His writing includes 'Sshhh' in Reverberations: The Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics of Noise (Continuum, 2012) plus the co-edited Extremity and Excess (2012). He also writes for a selection of print and online publications on subjects such as contemporary street art, the branding of cultural institutions and disco whilst maintaining a professional practice producing graphic design for music industry clients including Warner Brothers, Stiff Records, BMG and ZTT.
Fairclough, Kirsty: - Kirsty Fairclough is Professor of Screen Studies at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is the co-editor of The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop (2013), The Arena Concert: Music, Media and Mass Entertainment (Bloomsbury, 2016), Music/Video: Forms, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017), The Legacy of Mad Men: Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (2020), Prince and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2020), and author of the forthcoming Beyoncé Celebrity Feminism and Popular Culture (Bloomsbury). She is the curator of Sound and Vision: Pop Stars on Film and In Her View: Women Documentary Filmmakers film seasons at HOME, Manchester and Chair of Manchester Jazz Festival.
Goddard, Michael: - Michael N. Goddard is Senior Lecturer and Course Leader in Film, Television and Moving image at the University of Westminster, UK. He has published widely on international cinema, audiovisual culture, and media theory. He recently published a book, Impossible Cartographies on the cinema of Raúl Ruiz. He has also been doing research on the fringes of popular music culminating in co-editing two books on noise, Reverberations and Resonances. Most recently, his research focuses on contemporary audiovisual popular culture and urban space. He is currently a Special Visiting Researcher, working with a team of researchers at Unisinos, Brazil on the project, "Cities, Creative Industries and Popular Music Scenes."
