Music Video as Black Art?
Introduction | Music Film as Essay Film | Long-form Black Music Videos | Michael Jackson’s Panther Dance | Hype Williams | Music Video: A Canonical Guide
Belly, Hype Williams, 2008. Shot by Malik Sayeed
Introduction:
From Raengo, and Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video,” and Raengo, “Black Study @ GSU: The Album”:
This pathway through what we call the liquid blackness archive, i.e., the lineage of filmmakers and visual artists that liquid blackness has been following since 2013, is concerned with a specific moment in the early 2010s when music-driven short-form filmmaking, which, at an early moment, might have been understood as “music videos,” enters the spaces of high art.
Here we follow the many legacies of the experimentation with the politics of film form and the unruly archives of black sound and music attempted by the filmmakers of the LA Rebellion, particularly as channeled through what we call the Howard Pedagogy Lab, i.e. the mentorship of Haile Gerima at Howard University, which informed artists such as Arthur Jafa, Malik Sayeed, Bradford Young, Jenn Nkiru, and Kahlil Joseph (by association), among many others.
The title for this pathway comes from a conversation between Uri McMillan and Mark Anthony Neal for Left of Black.
McMillan and Neal interpret the complexity of contemporary black music video production as a “return” to its status as “art”—and specifically as black art—that self-consciously uses visual and sonic citations from various realms of black expressive culture including the visual and performing arts, fashion, design, and, obviously, the rich history of black music and black music production.
McMillan and Neal in conversation
McMillan and Neal implicitly refer to an earlier, more recognizable moment in Black music video history, the mid-1990s and early 2000s, when Hype Williams defined music video aesthetics as one of the single most important innovators of the form. Although it is rarely addressed in the literature on music videos, the glare of the prolific filmmaker’s influence extends beyond his signature luminous visual style; Williams distinguished the Black music video as a creative laboratory for a new generation of artists such as Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, and Jenn Nkiru. This generation of artists holds the freedom of expression achieved through Black music as an inspiration for formal experimentation in audiovisual media and approaches its filmmaking practice through musical processes, such as improvisation, remixing, looping, and sampling. Often working collaboratively, these artists have taken the music video into the art gallery and bridged the gap between this popular form, art cinema, and installation art.
McMillan and Neal’s conversation happens against the backdrop of increasing attention by the popular press to what Scruggs calls “the Golden Age of the Black Music Video.”
More specifically, in a 2016 article for the New Yorker, “The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,” on music videos shot by Arthur Jafa, Cassie da Costa explains that tracing the development of Black aesthetic modes across such diverse instantiations presents a distinct challenge. However, Jenny Gunn has argued in response that it may be precisely where the proper terms of the lineage seem the least transparent that the work of the archive becomes most necessary.
Sources:
da Costa, Cassie. “The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,” New Yorker, October 24, 2016.
Gunn, Jenny. “Re: ‘The Profound Power of the New Solange Videos,’ by Cassie da Costa, October 24, 2016,” letter to the editor of New Yorker, November 18, 2016.
Scruggs, Danielle. “We Are in the Golden Age of the Black Music Video”. Artsy, August 8, 2017
Raengo, Alessandra and Lauren McLeod Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video.” JCMS, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Winter 2020): 138-144
Raengo, Alessandra. “Black Study @ GSU: The Album,” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5, no. 1 on “Liquidity,” April 2021
“Complication.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 2013
Solange Knowles and Alan Ferguson, “Don’t Touch My Hair ft. Sampha,” 2016
When this group of Black music video directors apply musical techniques to high-art visual references—as, for example, in Young’s and Joseph’s frequent re-creation of Roy DeCarava’s photographs or when Alan Ferguson and Solange Knowles reproduce the painting “Complication” by Ghanaian-British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye in “Don’t Touch My Hair ft. Sampha”—they knowingly perform archival work. Like hip-hop producers “digging in the crates,” their work reorganizes history and challenges conventional thinking about medium specificity by bringing sometimes-unattended visual and sonic material to new surfaces.
The artists discussed here understand and develop their filmmaking process after the music-making process. Hence their work’s form is powerfully shaped by complex, nonlinear temporalities, a radical investigation of the sound-image relation, and the relationship between movement and sound as it occurs through synchronization. By establishing a “sizeable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives,” these filmmakers perform the inherently critical work of Black studies and distinguish the “Black music video,” within mainstream, popular spaces where this work is widely distributed, received—and most notably, appropriated.[1]
This pathway attempts to account for the “musicalization of vision” by tracing an artistic lineage that uses Black music as blueprint for image creation and thus enacts the audiovisuality that music video scholars are searching for as an art practice.[2] By layering visual and sonic histories, artists form alternative narratives about creativity, inspiration, and collaboration that demand the new historiographical approaches. We closely read these rigorous film essays to identify Black filmmakers’ contributions to both the methods and the concerns of Black studies that often go unnoticed in popular spaces like YouTube and SoundCloud. As he explains in his essay, “Secret History and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus go to the Movies,” Charles “Chip” Linscott, this education is about developing the sensitivity to register the “undertones” of Black art because, as Michele Prettyman describes, in her essay, “The Persistence of" Wild Style": Hip-Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation,” this lineage anachronistically combines musical processes and visual imagery to create “odd futures” that are not always legible. Additionally, tracing these complex temporalities reveals a precise gestural archive that connects Black dance and postures of “cool” to critiques of anti-Black violence and the exclusionary category of the human. The repetition of these gestures, through bodily movement or editing, becomes a tool for remediating diasporic memory—both beautiful and violent.
[1] Alexander Weheliye, “Introduction: Black Studies and Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 5–10.
[2]Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Music Video after MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2017), 62.
Sources:
Weheliye, Alexander.“Introduction: Black Studies and Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 5–10.
Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. Music Video after MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2017)
Prettyman, Michele. “The Persistence of" Wild Style": Hip-Hop and Music Video Culture at the Intersection of Performance and Provocation,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 151-157.
Linscott. Charles “Chip”. “Secret History and Visual Riffs, or, Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane, and Flying Lotus go to the Movies.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 145-150.
Music Film as Essay Film
Process, Kahlil Joseph (for Sampha), 2017
These artists’ theoretically engaged music videos should also be regarded as essay films that are in conversation with a previous generation of black filmmakers from Britain-- such as Sankofa and Isaac Julien, the Black Audio Film Collective and John Akomfrah, and, more recently, Steve McQueen--for the way they have already navigated and conceptualized their relationship with the spaces and institutions of “high” art.
James Tobias’s essay, "The Music Film as Essay: Montage as Argument in Khalil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process," explains how this tradition of Black essay films, use their generic indeterminacy to interpret the relationship between individual and collective memory. More specifically, processes of rememory central to this tradition are often mediated through sonic archives. In his essay, he focuses primarily on Process (for Sampha, 2017) and Fly Paper.
Sources:
James Tobias, "The Music Film as Essay: Montage as Argument in Khalil Joseph's Fly Paper and Process." JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 2 (2020): 157-162
Raengo and Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video.” JCMS, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Winter 2020): 138-144
Alessandra Raengo, “The Jurisgenerativity of a Liquid Praxis: A Conversation with John Akomfrah.” liquid blackness 1 April 2021; 5 (1): 127–148.
Long-Form Black Music Videos
Thriller, John Landis, 1982, featuring Michael Jackson
Michael Jackson
From Music Video to Short Film: A Cultural Revolution
Michael Jackson’s influence on the format of music videos, as short films, is most readily seen in “Thriller.” A cultural milestone, often referred to as the most influential video of all time (Greenberg 2012), Michael Jackson's Thriller (John Landis, 1982), introduced the concept of the long-form music video as a mini-movie, complete with dialogue, elaborate choreography, and costumes, into the music video format. Licensed and copywritten under United States and International law as a motion picture, the short film is notable for its iconic dance routine, and “aspects of montage and alternation conventions, [used to] organize the image flow by framing it with powerful storytelling or narrational direction which provide continuity and closure” (Mercer 37), “Thriller” was produced at a cost of more than $1 million. Though initially rejected by MTV as a Black artist, Jackson and his work on the “Thriller” album, including “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” could not be ignored. “A talented songwriter and storyteller; a sufficiently accomplished and innovative dancer who created a dance style combining images of hip-hop, Broadway, and disco (including the moonwalk); [and] beat-driven music” (Friedlander; 264), rendered him virtually tailor-made for MTV.
As culture producer and performer, Jackson’s talent became the fulcrum in an innovative model of video transformation, and the “Thriller” short film was the lever, elevating the music video from static marketing device to kinetic visual art. In redefining the video format, Jackson’s commitment to quality and narrative presentation in “Thriller” helped surmount MTV racial policies, opening the channel for Black artist participation, revolutionized music video production, popularized “making-of” documentaries, and propelled rentals and sales of VHS tapes for home use (Hebblethwaite 2013), situating MTV as a cultural force. “Thriller” is further credited with establishing an historic watershed moment, in which video production and the standardized use of cinematic format became part of “proper industry” practices that “altered forever the balance of sound and vision in the entertainment industry… Prior to Jackson, music alone had been the premier conduit of cultural dissemination among young people; after Jackson, it was merely the accompaniment to a dance routine, one small element in a larger spectacle” (Gill 2009). After MTV's December 1983 broadcast of “Thriller,” each new Jackson video became a major media event.
MTV's belated support of Jackson and “Thriller” signaled the end of its rock-only policy and, due to the popularity the film gained for the network, of concerns for its commercial survival (Mitchell & Newman 2009; Tannenbaum & Marks 2011; 156). Rolling Stone editors asserted that Jackson's groundbreaking video was the "turning point" for MTV, initiating a transformation in which the network “not only revolutionized virtually every aspect of the music business, from promotion to concert tours, but changed the way listeners/viewers related to music and to artists” (Greenberg 2012; Romnowski & George-Warren; 484). In December 2009, Michael Jackson's Thriller became the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry (Kilday 2013).
Contribution from Gail McFarland
Thriller (1983, John Landis)
Bad (Martin Scorsese, 1987)
Scream (1993, Mark Romanek*)
Remember the Time (John Singleton, 1991)
March 1983 Motown 25 Anniversary performance of “Billie Jean,” featuring the debut of Jackson's signature “Moonwalk,” multiple turns, and “frozen” toe-stand.
Segments noted include Jackson's (1) process of choreography building, including beatbox technique at 12:26-13:37. (2) use of body as metronome at 15:59-18:30. (3) "feeling" cues in music at 21:25-21:50. (4) method of performance notes with band at 25:30-28:30.
Sources:
Wallace, Michele. “Michael Jackson, Black Modernism and ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’.” The Journal of Michael Jackson Academic Studies 1, no. 4 (2015). Originally published in Third Text 3, no. 7 (1989): 11-22, and subsequently in Invisibility Blues, 77-90. London, New York: Verso, 2008.
Mercer, Kobena. "Monster metaphors: notes on Michael Jackson’s Thriller." Sound and vision: The music video reader (1993): 93-108.
The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, edited by Patricia Romanowski and Holly George-Warren, 484-486, 687. New York: Touchstone, 1995.
King, Jason. "Form and function: superstardom and aesthetics in the music videos of Michael and Janet Jackson." Velvet Light Trap (1999): 80-97.
Mitchell, Gail, and Melinda Newman. “How Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ Changed Music Business.” Reuters. Last modified July 6, 2009.
Cannon, Kristopher L. “Cutting Race Otherwise: Imagining Michael Jackson.” Post Identity 30 (2010): 28-36.
George, Nelson. Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson, Da Capo Press, 2010.
Greenberg, Steve. “Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ at 30: How One Album Changed the World.” Billboard. Last modified November 30, 2012.
Rossiter, Brian. "“They Don't Care About Us”: Michael Jackson's Black Nationalism." Popular Music and Society 35, no. 2 (2012): 203-222.
Tannenbaum, Rob, and Craig Marks. “‘I’m Not Like Other Boys”: Michael Jackson Saves A Struggling Network From Itself." In I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, 143-158, 241-243. New York: Plume Books, 2012.
Kilday, Gregg. “‘Thriller’ Lands in National Film Registry.” The Hollywood Reporter. Last modified December 16, 2013.
Mercer, Kobena. “Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’.” In Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, 33-51. London: Routledge, 2013.
King, Jason. "12. Don’t Stop’til You Get Enough: Presence, Spectacle, and Good Feeling in Michael Jackson’s Th is Is It." In Black Performance Theory, pp. 184-203. Duke University Press, 2014.
Gill, Andy. “‘Thriller’ Was the Masterpiece That Set Tone for Pop’s Next Generation.” The Independent. April 16, 2014.
Friedlander, Paul. “The Eighties: The Revolution Will Be Televised.” In Rock And Roll: A Social History, 264. London: Routledge, 2018
Hebblethwaite, Phil. “How Michael Jackson’s Thriller Changed Music Videos Forever.” The Guardian. Last modified March 4, 2021.
Prince’s Purple Rain
(Albert Magnoli, 1984, featuring Prince)
Prince - Purple Rain (Official Video)
Prince: I would die 4 u - Purple rain (movie version)
Source:
Lewis, Jon. "Purple Rain: Music Video Comes of Age." Jump/Cut 30: 1ff.
Georgia State University Student Work on Prince:
The Artist, Malik Jones
Malik Jones - Artist Statement:
Gone, but never forgotten. Prince is a legend. He transcended music and became a beacon of artistic freedom and self-expression. His skill and talent as a musician made him a once-in-a-lifetime virtuoso, one who could challenge the likes of Beethoven and Bach, but the way he freely crossed gender and racial boundaries made him an icon, the likes of which the world will never see again. In an era full of wild rock stars and enigmatic performers, The Artist explains what made Prince so special, how both his race and gender made him so controversial, and how his cultural impact will continue to be felt, now and forever.
Malik Jones is a writer and Prince fanatic from Atlanta, Georgia. As an audiophile who loves to learn and share stories about our great artists, performers, and cultural leaders, Malik is more than honored to be able to pay homage to Prince, one of the most culturally relevant artists the world has ever known.
When Purple Reigns: Prince as A Revolution, Alexandria Bryant
Alexandria Bryant - Artist Statement:
When Purple Reigns: Prince as a Revolution (2020) is a moving exploration of the symbolization of the artist Prince Rogers Nelson through the adoption of his love symbol. The video essay pieces together performance and interview clips to investigate Prince’s practice of non-attachment as a means of personification and defiance of any ontological reference. Here, every aspect of Prince’s creative and artistic being exists as praxis and in turn regarded and celebrated as a revolutionary act.
Alexandria Bryant is a scholar artist whose practice strives to study and create blackness as aesthetics within music and film. Her work takes a particular interest in the archive, Afrofuturism and art as a revolutionary act.
Michael Jackson’s Panther Dance
Panther Dance: Black or White (Michael Jackson, John Landis, 1991)
Sources:
Black or White (John Landis, featuring Michael Jackson, 1991)
Chin, “Michael Jackson’s Panther Dance: Double Consciousness and the Uncanny Business of Performing While Black.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 1: 58–74.
Chin relates MJ’s video back to the black cast musical by reading the “panther dance” as a variation of the musical’s dream sequence
If “Thriller” stands as Michael Jackson’s intervention into the short form music video, the video for “Black or White” (1991) marks yet another rupture to the traditional definition; it was quickly deemed too controversial and censored after its full eleven minute run on Fox Television. Directed by John Landis and choreographed by Vincent Paterson (the team who worked on “Thriller”), the narrative of “Black or White” uses the familiar framing device that their previous short video employs, but this video goes farther, deeper, moving back and forth between realities. The video starts in a suburban neighborhood and focuses on an all-American father played by George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) scolding his son, Macaulay Culkin, for listening to “noise” and dancing in his bedroom. A framed Michael Jackson poster falls from the wall and shatters; the boy breaks out his own red electric guitar and with the first strums he literally blows off the roof of his house and catapults his father, easy chair and all, into Jackson’s song. The father is soon forgotten as Jackson dances with an African tribe, Balinese women, and spans the globe with different dancers until he finally lands atop a digital Statue of Liberty. Global landmarks and monuments surround him before he returns to the block where Culkin lip syncs to song writer Bill Bottrell’s rapping. The morphing of faces follows, gender and race breached as one face seamlessly shifts to another and the chorus of “Black or White” is seemingly made literal. Even this section bears scrutiny; Alexander Weheilye writes of the audio, “But make sure to take your time listening, otherwise you might miss not-quite-yet observable and the barely audible frequencies of the murmurs beneath the blood” (2019).
The video might stop here but it doesn’t; the camera pulls back and a set complete with director and crew is revealed. A black panther prowls his way through the studio execs and the dancers; there’s no music as he moves from the brightly lit interior to the cool grays of the New York city street. For the next four minutes the only sounds that punctuate the night are that of Jackson tapping in and out of water, the drag of his hand over his body, his repeating scream, and glass shattering before Jackson turns back into the panther to slink off into the background. The four minutes function as an inversion of an expected musical break and, as Elizabeth Chin (2011) writes, a reimagining of the dream ballet as understood in the traditional sense. As unexpected as the Panther Dance sequence is in the flow of the narrative, it feels strangely familiar. Not only does the short film allude to other works, but it provides filmic quotation (Palis, 2020). Carol Clover (1995) notes the similarities with Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain (Donen, 1952) sequence; she also draws the comparison with Stanley Kubrick’s revision of the same dance sequence in Clockwork Orange (1971), citing the violence of Jackson’s splashing and the ever-present gaze of the police. Music journalist Joseph Vogel also calls out the obvious reference to the trash bin thrown into a shop window from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). While the video will continue and move into the animated space of The Simpson’s set against Jackson’s bright riffs, and Homer will admonish Bart, and all of us, to turn off the noise, the panther dance sequence with its absence of music and color is what remains long after the screen fades to black.
Contribution from Ashley Hendrix.
Sources:
Cerone, Daniel. 1991. “Michael’s Video Takes Beating; 4 Minutes Cut: Reaction: Negative response causes Michael Jackson to apologize for video sequence in which he attacks a car and simulates masturbation.” Los Angeles Times, November 16, 1991.
Clover, Carol J. “Dancin' in the Rain.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 722-747.
Chin, Elizabeth, “Michael Jackson’s Panther Dance: Double Consciousness and the Uncanny Business of Performing While Black.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 23, no. 1 (2011): 58-74.
Vogel, Joseph. “The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson's Music.” The Atlantic, February 8, 2012.
Taete, Jamie Lee Curtis. “Meet the Mystery Man Who Rapped on Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White.’” Vice, May 4, 2015.
Vogel, Joseph. “Black and White: how Dangerous kicked off Michael Jackson's race paradox.” The Guardian, March 17, 2018.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Beyond the Doctrine of Man: Decolonial Visions of the Human. Bronx: Fordham University Press, 2019.
Palis, Eleni. “Race, Authorship and Film Quotation in Post-Classical Cinema.” Screen 61, no 2 (2020): 230-254.
Arthur Jafa on Michael Jackson
Arthur Jafa on Michael Jackson as Self-Loather, Shape Shifter & Classically Black. “After the Dance: Conversations on Michael Jackson's Black America,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, June 5, 2010.
Arthur Jafa on The Impact of Michael Jackson’s Isolation From the Black Community. “After the Dance: Conversations on Michael Jackson's Black America,” Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, June 5, 2010
The Golden Age of Music Video: Hype Williams
![Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot, “The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly],” Hype Williams, 1997](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5ebeab0729212022c4b5b91d/1623901898883-U69US5LVC1L0Y065G22N/Hype+Williams_Missy+Elliott.jpg)
Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot, “The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly],” Hype Williams, 1997
“I instilled in [music] video the way I felt about rap: it was bigger than life” - Hype Williams
From Raengo, and Cramer, “The Unruly Archives of Black Music Video”:
In their conversation, McMillan and Neal implicitly refer to an earlier, more recognizable moment in Black music video history, the mid-1990s and early 2000s, when Hype Williams defined music video aesthetics as one of the single most important innovators of the form.
Although it is rarely addressed in the literature on music videos, the glare of the prolific filmmaker’s influence extends beyond his signature luminous visual style; Williams distinguished the Black music video as a creative laboratory for a new generation of artists such as Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, and Jenn Nkiru.
Williams helped create the music video’s televisual aesthetic that trained audiences to “listen to music by looking at it.”[1] As he understood it, he created a vision for a specific type of music and had the fortune to be able “to communicate with the world through his camera.”[2] As Jason King pointed out in 1999, “Music videos are one of the few sites in which the negotiation of a sustained aesthetic avant-garde in popular black culture remains an express aspiration.”[3]
Williams achieved this in part because of his love of the craft and explicit desire to elevated into an artform. His expansive view of art categories put him in dialogue with eclectic visual artists (including Michel Gondry, Jean Baptiste Mondini, and Jean-Paul Goude) and drove his collaborations with Black artists working in other mediums (e.g., the prolific stylist June Ambrose).
If, as McMillan and Neal agree, John Legend or Kanye West are musicians who are also visual artists –think particularly about Kanye’s Runaway-- Hype Williams practiced what Toni Morrison described as the liquidity of the black arts much earlier: for example, by approaching soul music as inherently visual.[4]
Thus, Hype Williams’s work is essential in the history that connects academic writing on music videos, often concerned with the “celebrity machine” propelled by television networks and, now, online video-sharing platforms, [5] and the current environment within which the art press has focused on artists like Young, Jafa, Joseph, and their praxes.
Perhaps Hype Williams has also an underestimated role in passing on both the music video as a space of experimentation for black artists and the pivotal role of the visual in hip hop culture down to the next generation. As much as Williams knew to be central to “music culture” and to have become part of hip hop history he was also intent in “passing it on”.
About Hype Williams:
Hype Williams’s output can be divided in three main periods: his earlier works where one can see his style in development (1991-1995), his most dominant era where he was in greatest demand (1996-2001), and his solidified era of style and innovation, continuing his signature look.
Roger Beebe offers perhaps the earliest comprehensive summary of the aesthetic of Williams’s videos:
“Williams’s signature style was primarily introduced through two early videos (for Busta Rhymes’s “Woo Has [Got You All in Check]” and Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliot’s “The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]”) In 1997 and 1998 Williams’s videos were almost inescapable. This aesthetic is primarily characterized by the use of extreme wide-angle and fish-eye lenses; highly reflective (metallic or wet) surfaces; luminous objects in the frame (neon, incandescent, and fluorescent bulbs); jerky, stop-and-start motion created by shooting at high frame rates with the actors moving slowly and accentuated by ramping up and down speed of playback; symmetrical and/or circular sets; costume and set design in bold primary colors creating a number of specifically colored environments; and the intercutting among a series of these colored environments within a single video.” (Beebe 316)
Beebe turns to MTV videos, the emergence of the video director as an identified collaborator and the use of pastiche to demonstrate how auteurism and pastiche have developed. He uses the work of Hype Williams to show how his style not only changed the look of the hip hop video but also became the source of the pastiche mode in other genres of music. His most significant example comes from Spike Jonze’s video for Notorious B.I.G.’s “Sky’s the Limit” where Jonze offers a double layer of pastiche: the overall concept for the video is taken from the 1976 film Bugsy Malone, a gangster film where the cast is 12yrs old and underacting as adults. Additionally, Jonze shoots the video in the style of Hype Williams as recognition of the strong collaborative relationship between Williams and the late B.I.G. Beebe’s aim, in part, is to stress the importance of recognizing the privilege associated with theory developed within the cultural dominant, the need to explore “multiple cultural logics that is not simply derived from the aesthetic production of a white cultural elite. Such an exploration would provide a necessary to Jameson’s useful diagnosis of the state of the cultural dominant.” (Beebe, 322)
[1] Arnold et al., 5.
[2] Hype Williams Interview, 2003. Youtube
[3] Jason King, "Form and function: superstardom and aesthetics in the music videos of Michael and Janet Jackson," Velvet Light Trap (1999): 80-97.
[4] Toni Morrison, "Abrupt Stops and Unexpected Liquidity: The Aesthetics of Romare Bearden." In The Romare Bearden Reader, pp. 178-184. Duke University Press, 2019.
[5] Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard, introduction to Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media, ed. Gina Arnold, Daniel Cookney, Kirsty Fairclough, and Michael Goddard (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 7.
Sources:
Beebe, Roger. "Paradoxes of pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the race of the postmodern auteur." In Medium Cool, pp. 303-328. Duke University Press, 2007.
Vernallis, Carol. "The Most Terrific Sandbox”: Music Video Directors, Style, and the Question of the Auteur." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25, no. 5 (2008): 404-425.
DeFrantz, Thomas. “Believe the Hype: Hype Williams and Afrofuturist Filmmaking”
Thompson, Krista. "The sound of light: Reflections on art history in the visual culture of hip-hop." The Art Bulletin 91, no. 4 (2009): 481-505.
Vernallis, Carol. Unruly media: YouTube, music video, and the new digital cinema. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Hype Williams: Interview at Red Bull Music Academy
Hype Williams Interview, 2003
Busta Rhymes - Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See (Official Video)
Tupac Shakur feat. Dr. Dre and Roger Troutman – "California Love" (version 2: Mad Max, 1996)
Missy Elliot, The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly, 1997)
Kanye West – "Diamonds from Sierra Leone" (2005)
The Notorious B.I.G. feat. Puff Daddy and Mase, "Mo Money Mo Problems" (1997)
The Notorious B.I.G. - "Sky's The Limit" (dir. Spike Jones, 1997)
Scarface – "Mary Jane" (1997) shot by Malik Sayeed
Kanye West feat. Jamie Foxx – "Gold Digger" (2005) shot by Malik Sayeed
Will Smith “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It”
Jay-Z feat. UGK – "Big Pimpin'" (2000)
TLC, No Scrubs (1999)
Beyoncé and Lady Gaga Videophone (2009)
GSU Student Work on Hype Williams:
Cayce Tiedemand - Artist Statement:
In the following video, “The Visual Movement of Hype Williams,” Cayce Tiedeman seeks to map how Black Visual Intonation became embedded in popular hip-hop culture using an Afrofuturist and surrealist lens. Emphasis on the intersection is repeated throughout Cayce's work such as the joining of film and music or literature and visual art.
Cayce is an Atlanta-native writer, editor, and filmmaker who received her Bachelor of Arts in film and media with a minor in music graduating summa cum laude from Georgia State University in May of 2020. During her time at GSU, she focused her studies on documentary, race and representation in the media, and the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality.
Belly (1998)
From: Lauren Cramer, “Deep/Down: Hype Williams’s Belly,” forthcoming on ASAP/J
By submerging its characters in opaque darkness, Hype Williams’s 1998 crime classic Belly seems to relish the uncertain point where race and color overlap; it’s an anxious space shaped by the irreconcilability of blackness. The story follows two best friends, hot-headed Tommy played by rapper DMX and aptly named Sincere played by Nas, as they navigate a dangerous world of drugs and guns in New York City. Although their ambition to work with Jamaican drug-runners and take over rival dealers’ territory is predictably ill-fated, their obligatory rehabilitation occurs in an unconvincing happy ending that has no real effect on the titillating images of sex and criminality that precede it. In this way, the film neglects to offer an appropriately sentimental critique of racism through convincing narrative resolution or aesthetic refusal. Instead, Belly displays its willingness to reveal both racial and chromatic blackness’s utility in the production of two-dimensional images. This imprudent disclosure of cinema’s narrative and technological reliance on blackness (again, the violent treatment of Black characters and the careful management of darkness) is perhaps the reason why, as Racquel Gates has explained, critical discourse has largely forgotten the film and its immeasurable aesthetic influence while conferring the visually similar film Moonlight (2016) with the status of “critical darling.”[1] Formally, Belly is a study in sensitometry that evokes the style of film noir and an esteemed aesthetic lineage of saturated, high contrast black images, which includes Williams’s own established oeuvre honed throughout his prolific career directing music videos.[2] The film’s frequent superimpositions, converging storylines, slow motion, incorporation of Williams’s signature wide-angle lens and, the flatness of the film’s many backlit and otherwise monochromatic shots traps the film in the uneasy but urgent space of experiencing blackness (as a color, identity, sound, swag, question, problem, attachment…) all at once.
[1] Racquel Gates, “The Last Shall Be First: Aesthetics and Politics in Black Film and Media,” Film Quarterly 71, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 41. Additionally, I am grateful to writer and film curator Ashely Clark for pointing out the film’s likely influence on other critically successful films including Spring Breakers (Korine, 2012) and Good Time (Safdie and Safdie, 2017).
[2] This vast, interdisciplinary tradition of Black artists working with chromatic blackness includes, but is certainly not limited to: Roy DeCarava’s photography, Kerry James Marshall’s painting and photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Simone Leigh’s sculptures, and films made by Jordan Peele.
Belly (Hype Williams, 1998), opening scene
Watch:
Belly (Hype Williams, 1998, shot by Malik Sayeed)
Clockers (Spike Lee, 1995, shot by Malik Sayeed)
He Got Game, Spike Lee, 1998, shot by Malik Sayeed)
Music Video: A Canonical Guide
How is Music Video normally understood?
Bohemian Rapsody, Queen 1975
At the beginning of his book Music Video After MTV Mathias Korsgaard writes:
“In order to be able to study music video at all, it is necessary to begin by defining what constitutes a music video. At the outset, this seems like a simple task, but many questions quickly surface. When was the first music video made? What formal traits characterize the music video? Is it a genre, a medium, or something else? As I will show, none of these questions allows as straightforward an answer as one might think—and some of them are practically unanswerable. However, in this chapter, I try to address these questions, and, in my attempt to define what a music video is, I follow three trajectories: the history of music video, an attempted formal definition of music video, and the question of music video genres. In all three cases, I argue for the complexity of music video.”
Eventually, he offers the following as a base-line definition of Music Video:
1. Music Videos are brief
2. They operate through combination of music and visuals
3. Use pop or rock music
4. The song is pre-recorded
5. Double goal: both commercial and entertaining
6. The song remains intact: the song’s length determines the video’s length
7. Images illustrate the song in order to sell it
The heterogeneity of music video derives from at least three aspects: first, its overt multimodality and intermedial nature, which allow for many different combinations of image, sound and text; second, the fact that so many videos are produced (a practically innumerable amount that continues to increase daily is bound to be somewhat heterogeneous); third, the tendency to use music video as a site for audiovisual experimentation. This frequent experimentation often takes on the form of a search for novel and innovative types of audiovisual combination, a search for aesthetic expressions that appear new.
Particularly influential to Korsgaard’s thinking, he writes, “have been some of the writings specifically on music video (most notably the work of Carol Vernallis and Kevin Williams’ book Why I [Still] Want My MTV), some of the scarce writings on audiovisuality (mainly Michel Chion’s work, but also others), certain factions of (new) media studies (both Bolter and Grusin’s book on remediation and the work of Lev Manovich in particular), Steven Shaviro’s writings on post-cinematic media, and several theoretical inquiries into questions of intermediality.”
Excerpts from:
Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. Music video after MTV: Audiovisual studies, new media, and popular music. Routledge, 2017.
Below is a list of the main sources used in this chapter, listed in chronological order, which we offer as a essential bibliography on the way music video has been canonically understood.
Sources:
Ehrenstein, David. “Pre-MTV.” Film Comment 19, no. 4 (1983).
Lynch, Joan D. “Music Videos: From Performance to Dad-Surrealism.” Journal of Popular Culture 18, no. 1 (1984).
Kinder, Marsha. “Music Video and the Spectator: Television, Ideology and Dream.” Film Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1984).
Shore, Michael. The Rolling Stone Book of Rock Video. The Definitive Look at Visual Music from Elvis Presley – and before – to Michael Jackson – and Beyond. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985.
Laing, David. “Music Video: Industrial Product, Cultural Form.” Screen 26, no. 1 (1985).
Aufderheide, Pat. “Music videos: The look of the sound.” Journal of Communication 36, no. 1 (1986):
57-78.
Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Denisoff, Serge R. Inside MTV. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books, 1988.
Firth, Simon. Music for pleasure: essays in the sociology of pop. New York: Routledge, 1988.
Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: sound on screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Blaine, Allan. “Musical Cinema, Music Video, Music Television.” Film Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1990).
Lukow, Gregory. “The Antecedents of MTV: Soundies, Scopitones and Snaders, and the History of an Ahistorical Form.” In Art of the Music Video: Ten Years After, curated by Michael Nash. Long Beach Museum of Art (1991).
Gow, Joe. 1992. “Music Video as Communication: Popular Formulas and Emerging Genres.” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 2 (1992).
Curtis, Scott. “Early Warner Bros. Cartoons.” In Sound Theory, Sound Practice, edited by Rick Altman. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Firth, Simon, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
McGrath, Tom. Mtv: The Making of a Revolution. London and New York: Running Press, 1996.
Mundy, John. Popular Music on Screen: From the Hollywood Musical to Music Video. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
Darley, Andrew. Visual Digital Culture. Routledge, 2000.
Feinemann, Neil, and Steve Reiss. Thirty Frames per Second: The Visionary Art of the Music Video. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2000.
Neavorson, Bob. “Tell Me What You See: The Influence and Impact of the Beatles’ Movies.” In The Beatles, Popular Music and Society: A Thousand Voices, edited by Ian Inglis. New York: Macmillan, 2000.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2001.
Cohan, Steven, ed. Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Bolter, David J., and Richard A. Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.
Peeters, Heidi. “The Semiotics of Music Video: It Must Be Written in the Stars.” Image & Narrative. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, (May, 2004).
Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing music video: aesthetics and cultural context. New York: Columbia University, 2004.
Herzog, Amy. “Discordant Visions: The Peculiar Musical Images of the Soundies Jukebox Film.” American Music 22, no. 1 (2004).
Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2004.
Tate, Joseph. The Music and Art of Radiohead. Burlington: Ashgate, 2005.
Brougher, Kerry. “Visual-Music Culture.” In Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Science since 1900, edited by Brougher et al. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005.
Willis, Holly. New Digital Cinema: Reinventing the Moving Image. London and New York: Wallflower, 2005.
Calavita, Marco. “MTV Aesthetics’ at the Movies: Interrogating a Film Criticism Fallacy.” Journal of Film and Video 59, no. 3 (2007).
Turim, Maureen. “Art/Music/Video.com.” In Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, edited by Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Sexton, Jamie, ed. Music, Sound, and Multimedia: From the Live to the Virtual. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007.
McDonnell, Maura. “Visual Music.” Visual Music Marathon Program Catalog, (April, 2007).
Beebe, Roger, and Jason Middleton, eds. Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones. Durham.: Duke University Press, 2007.
Austerlitz, Saul. Money for nothing: A history of the music video, from the Beatles to the White Stripes. New York: Continuum, 2007.
Pegley, Kip. Coming to You Wherever You Are: Much Music, MTV, and Youth Audiences. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.
Vernallis, Carol. “The Most Terrific Sandbox’: Music Video Directors, Style, and the Question of the Auteur.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 25, no. 5 (2008).
Temporal, Ray Paul. The Branding of MTV: Will Internet Kill the Video Star? New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Rizzo, Teresa. “YouTube: The Cinema of Attractions.” Scan: Journal of Media Arts Culture 5, no. 1 (2008).
Shaviro, Steven. “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales.” Film-Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2010): 1-102.
Marks, Craig, and Rob Tennenbaum. I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. New York: Dutton, 2011.
Richardson, John. An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Railton, Diane, and Paul Watson. Music video and the politics of representation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
Vernallis, Carol. Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Keazor, Henry, and Thorston Wübbena, eds. Rewind, Play, Fast forward: the past, present and future of the music video. Transcript: Verlag (2015).
Frahm, Laura. “Liquid Cosmos.” In Rewind, Play, Fast Forward, edited by Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena. Transcript: Verlag (2015): 155-178.
Kelly, Andrea. “‘A Revolution in the Atmosphere’: The Dynamics of Site and Screen in 1940s Soundies.” Cinema Journal 54, no. 2 (2015).
Kaplan, Ann E. Rocking around the clock: Music television, postmodernism, and consumer culture. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. Music video after MTV: Audiovisual studies, new media, and popular music. New York: Routledge, 2017.