Description: A lively, wide-ranging and timely edited collection that takes a cross-disciplinary approach to the music video.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes:
"The strange beast we call "music video" has long since overflowed the contexts and aesthetics first set for it in the era of 1980s MTV. This superbly edited collection expands our understandings of both music and video, and brings to our attention the multiplicity and complexity of their combinations in 20th and 21st century audiovisual cultures." --Adrian Martin, author of Mise en scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art (2014) and Professor, Monash University, Australia
"What can we learn from music videos? The essays in this brilliant collection move between MTV and YouTube, analog and digital, Bjork's erotics and Bowie's multiple masks, Laibach's televisual subversions and Duran Duran's audiovisual "transfiguration [from] suburban wannabes to global pop stars."" --Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English, Wayne State University, USA "Music/Video panoramically explores the separate and simultaneous effects of the two media. The collection incisively probes pre-existing critiques, and literally offers re-vision of the music video in challenging expositions with broad historical and cultural inclusivity. This book's analytical discourses will certainly affect the ways its readers see music." --Mike Alleyne, Professor of Recording Industry, Middle Tennessee State University, USA "Music video may well be a promotional device for the music industry, reproducing hegemonic representations of identity, but as this collection of engaging essays shows, alternative visions proliferate in the multiple spaces between high art, low culture, and viral video. Bookended by a historical view on the music video aesthetic, and an assessment of contemporary digital and online music video, the collection offers welcome examples of female self-representation that attempt to reach beyond objectification, as well as of experimental approaches to the art of music video." --Hillegonda C Rietveld, Professor of Sonic Culture, London South Bank University, UK "Music video has been a key cultural driver and remains beloved by audiences all over the globe, but there's much we don't understand about its history and poetics. This book is required reading for aficionados of the genre, scholars engaged with popular culture, and anyone thinking about audiovisual media in our historical moment. Full of startling connections and deep insights, the essays in Music/Video show how rich the genre has been--and how much we can learn from it." --Carol Vernallis, Affiliated Researcher, Stanford University, USA