…The Semiotics of Stars: It must Be Written within Music Videos
Music videos often have been characterized as the ultimate medium of the postmodern world. Fast. Empty. Lascivious. At least that is how the majority of the academic and educated world perceives them. Using Frederic Jameson's terms, music videos have been defined as a schizophrenic string of isolated, discontinuous signifiers, failing to link up into a coherent sequence, as a string without a center. Andrew Goodwin talked about "semiotic pornography", "electronic wallpaper" and "neo-fascist propaganda" and Michael Shore defined the medium by its so-called "decadence", its "surface without substance", by its "clichéd imagery".
The critical condemnation of the music video object and the reduction of the medium to shallowness and superficiality however have in no way reduced the influence of the phenomenon, as its omniscience and penetration into capitalist society have been protruding steadily over the last few decades. The fact that MTV has become the ultimate forum on which youth culture is both expressed and constructed has transformed the music video not only into the most effective tool for promotion within the music industry, but also into a powerful ideological force. On a visually artistic level, the cult around music video directors as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham proves the medium to be transcending the stigma of dull commerciality, entering the realm of culture, if not art. Far less than being a mere training ground for feature film directors as Jonze himself, Tony and Ridley Scott or David Fincher, music videos have become a legitimate field and established photographers like Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Herb Rittz and David Lachapelle have proven all to eager to enter the new medium. Music videos are also infiltrating at film festivals all over the world and even claiming independence by the recent phenomenon of music video festivals. In short, music videos have become a center of commercial, popular and artistic interest.
Considering the artistic, commercial and ideological potential of the medium, it becomes necessary to investigate both the semiotics of the clip text and its function within society at a deeper level. For the investigation of an object of study as multidimensional as the music video, using signifiers from different sensorial domains, the field of cultural studies with its interdisciplinary approach can provide tools for interpretation. At this preliminary stage, the main concern of investigation should be the discovery of a pattern within the "hysteria" of sensorial dimensions, maybe even of a common denominator around which all the different clip elements could be centered. I claim that such a center does exist. This base, this center around which all visual, auditive, kinetic, narrative, commercial, social, communicational and artistic dimensions circle, turns out to be the star of the music video. The star is the one that lends the video world its splendor, that gives the audiovisual elements their enchanting attraction and that illuminates viewers all over the world from the Olympus of the screen. This may seem rather obvious, but one would be surprised at how the majority of theorists still consider music videos to be visualizations of a song. There is no need to say that I strongly reject the jamesonean view on music videos. While they may seem discontinuous on a syntagmatic level, the shots are highly connected through the image of the star.
Before going into the semiotic analysis of the clip text as such, a brief investigation of the technological, institutional and artistic influences that culminated in the medium as we have come to know it would be useful, although within the limits of this article, any history will have to be reduced to a crude sketch, merely an outline. More importantly, investigating the semiotics, the universals of the music video at this stage implies focusing on the most central instances of the medium. As much as I adore some 'experimental' videos, investigating them at this stage would be trying to run without being able to walk. Before being able to define why some music videos may strike us as alternative and experimental, we need to focus on the mechanism of videos in the center of the medium, popular videos of popular stars. The MTV Video Music Award nominations seem to be fairly representative for the popularity of both stars and music videos, so they have been the guideline in the selection of my corpus.
…The Semiotics of Stars: It must Be Written within Music Videos
Music videos often have been characterized as the ultimate medium of the postmodern world. Fast. Empty. Lascivious. At least that is how the majority of the academic and educated world perceives them. Using Frederic Jameson's terms, music videos have been defined as a schizophrenic string of isolated, discontinuous signifiers, failing to link up into a coherent sequence, as a string without a center. Andrew Goodwin talked about "semiotic pornography", (the study of signs/symbols – signs which propose sexual pleasure / connotations & denote pornographic tendencies) "electronic wallpaper" and "neo-fascist propaganda" and Michael Shore defined the medium by its so-called "decadence", its "surface without substance", by its "clichéd imagery".
The critical condemnation of the music video object and the reduction of the medium to shallowness and superficiality however have in no way reduced the influence of the phenomenon, as its omniscience (infinite knowledge) and penetration (breakthrough) into capitalist society have been protruding (extending above the surface) steadily over the last few decades. The fact that MTV has become the ultimate forum on which youth culture is both expressed and constructed has transformed the music video not only into the most effective tool for promotion within the music industry, but also into a powerful ideological force (social aspirations). On a visually artistic level, the cult around music video directors as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze and Chris Cunningham proves the medium to be transcending (extending, greater power / independent of) the stigma of dull commerciality (mass market – advertising – industry production for profit), entering the realm of culture, if not art (effectively advertising disguised as cultural entertainment). Far less than being a mere training ground for feature film directors as Jonze himself, Tony and Ridley Scott or David Fincher, music videos have become a legitimate field and established photographers like Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Herb Rittz and David Lachapelle have proven all to eager to enter the new medium. Music videos are also infiltrating (penetrating this market) at film festivals all over the world and even claiming independence by the recent phenomenon of music video festivals. In short, music videos have become a center of commercial, popular and artistic interest. (for example the LAMVF)
Considering the artistic, commercial and ideological potential of the medium, it becomes necessary to investigate both the semiotics of the clip text and its function within society at a deeper level. For the investigation of an object of study as multidimensional (several dimensions) as the music video, using signifiers from different sensorial domains (sensory areas – eg: through eyes, ears & sexual pleasure), the field of cultural studies with its interdisciplinary (involving x2 of more academic disciplines)approach can provide tools for interpretation. At this preliminary stage, the main concern of investigation should be the discovery of a pattern within the "hysteria" of sensorial dimensions, maybe even of a common denominator around which all the different clip elements could be centered. I claim that such a center does exist. This base, this center around which all visual, auditive, kinetic, narrative, commercial, social, communicational and artistic dimensions circle, turns out to be the star of the music video. The star is the one that lends the video world its splendor, that gives the audiovisual elements their enchanting attraction and that illuminates viewers all over the world from the Olympus (mountain) of the screen. This may seem rather obvious, but one would be surprised at how the majority of theorists still consider music videos to be visualizations of a song. There is no need to say that I strongly reject the jamesonean view on music videos. While they may seem discontinuous on a syntagmatic level, the shots are highly connected through the image of the star.
Before going into the semiotic analysis of the clip text as such, a brief investigation of the technological, institutional and artistic influences that culminated in the medium as we have come to know it would be useful, although within the limits of this article, any history will have to be reduced to a crude sketch, merely an outline. More importantly, investigating the semiotics, the universals of the music video at this stage implies focusing on the most central instances of the medium. As much as I adore some 'experimental' videos, investigating them at this stage would be trying to run without being able to walk. Before being able to define why some music videos may strike us as alternative and experimental, we need to focus on the mechanism (interactive system) of videos in the center of the medium, popular videos of popular stars. The MTV Video Music Award nominations seem to be fairly representative for the popularity of both stars and music videos, so they have been the guideline in the selection of my corpus.
A new medium is born, and born again
When building a theoretical matrix (A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained) into which a crude historical sketch of the music video could be drawn, we first need to position the phenomenon in the landscape of contemporary media. It would not be unthinkable to regard the music video as a sub-genre of the medium film, as a sort of commercial, as visual radio or just as television entertainment, but none of these approaches would take into account the basic purpose and specificity of the medium, namely the creation of stars. Their specificity, and the fact that music videos can reach their audience through different bearers such as television, the Internet, pellicule, video, DVD and compact disc show that they should be regarded as an independent genre or an independent medium.
The notion of cultural form by Raymond Williams enables us to situate the clip as a dynamic and flexible phenomenon, adaptable to the historical and cultural context in which it is viewed. Although Williams takes the apparatus to be part of this context, the producers, the public and the experience are just as important in defining the medium. The apparatus of music videos involves both the technical means of production, with different sorts of cameras and digital postproduction devices, and those of consumption, ranging from television screens over the Internet to DVD-players. The producers are just as diverse, since the star itself, as well as directors and technicians, music mixers, make-up artists and pr-managers from both film and music companies are involved. As far as music video consumers are concerned, they could of course be anyone, but the target group op the medium is the ever renewing MTV-generation, a group of youngsters between fourteen and twenty-five, still in search for the right identity and willing to spend money on it. The most difficult item to define remains the clip-experience, an extremely variable concept, depending on the psychological and cultural background of the viewer and on the moment of watching, but most of all on the text itself,as one should not underestimate the level to which production teams are able to manipulate stimuli and to guide viewers into the desired affects. As a response, viewers in stead of changing the channel, should stay tuned, buy the cd or imitate dance moves,style and consumption patterns of their admired star.
Added to the notion of cultural form, Stanley Cavell's concept of automatism can bring in the video's specificity, namely its mechanism of star creation . Cavell has defined automatism to be the basis of a medium; a structural formula that has been created within a certain oeuvre, but proves so productive that it automatically starts reproducing itself in other stances, hence creating the medium. Cavell's medium concept could at first sight be just as easily exchanged for the more common notion of genre, but as genre usually is conceptualized to be a subgroup of a larger medium, that notion would eclipse the specificity of the music video mechanism.However, before analyzing the mechanism internally, it seems useful to explore the external factors, historical, technological, social and economical, that produced the medium as we know it.
The concept of the second birth of a medium by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion can help to structure the history of music video as a cultural practice, although that history will within the scope of this article necessarily be limited to a crude sketch and the account will contain a fair amount of teleological thinking. The main idea behind the second birth is that in order to be institutionalized as a real medium, a cultural practice will have to eliminate certain aspects of itself, hence go through a partial suicide and be born again with well-defined aims and a well-structured mechanism. In the case of the music video, this means that from the wide range of short films to visualize a song or a piece of music, only those that actually were meant to create a star image for the musical performer, would remain within the scope of the medium. I propose to pinpoint this second birth of the music video, which in reality of course happened rather as a gradual process, to the 1 st of august 1981, the day that the music channel MTV started broadcasting in America with the clip "Video Killed the Radio Star".The channel would probably not have been founded if clips did not already exist in the first place, but the worldwide institutionalization of music videos as a medium of promotion, entertainment and art, and the clip mechanism as we know it today, would not have been possible unless something like music television came into being.
Before MTV saw the light, clips had already been shown on television, but the line between what were music videos and what were just filmed performances was not very clear at that time. In the process of medium reincarnation this stage would be termed the first birth. The success of TV-shows in the 1960's such as Bandstand or The Ed Sullivan Show, where popular artists performed their new songs, have been a major impetus for the production of clips, as the most famous performers would soon not be able anymore to attend all the shows. The production of video clips seemed the most convenient solution. Clips turned out to have a broader range of artistic possibilities than the staged performances, as they were not bound to the limits of the spatial and temporal reality on stage. The Beatles' song "Paperbackwriter" is credited for being the first music video ever broadcasted on television.
Before these first clips were shown on television, however, the sixties had already witnessed the hype of the Scopitones, "coin-operated entertainment machines featuring visual accompaniment for a musical number".The origin of these visual jukeboxes dates back to Edison's invention of the Kinetograph, but it was only after the Second World War that the French company Cameca developed the Scopitone-machine. These peephole-devices were to entertain the public in cafés and clubs with music films of about three minutes length and proving to be highly successful, the first machines would be exported to America in 1963. The Scopitones did not necessarily have to feature famous artists singing and could just as easily show exotic tribal dances, stripteases to music or jazz band choreographies. Promotion of a musical number or creation of a star image were at that time still secondary to the attraction, to spectacular entertainment or to satisfying the peepshow desires of the club audiences. It seems to be the case that those priorities would be inversed in later music videos, where spectacular entertainment and striptease allusions would only be linked to the spectacular divinity and the glamorous sex appeal of the star.
The Scopitones that did feature artists, however, already constructed these artists as the central element of the clip with both filmic and pro-filmic devices. The mise-en-cadre (FRAMEWORK) was so designed as to guide the viewers' attention towards the star, making him/her the center of the world within the frame. Also the costumes, the lightning and choreographies were intended to put the artist in the spotlight, with contrast as the key notion, making it advisable for the star to wear different outfits than the backing vocalists, to perform different dance moves and to be the only one to address the camera. Anyhow, the audience was likely to link the voice they heard to the person whose lips were moving, whereas instrumental music would more easily be taken for granted as an indication of the appropriate emotional effect. In this way, the artist in Scopitones could not only be identified as the visual, but also as the auditive center of interest in the clips.
Some cultural practices introduced elements that, even though important for the development of the clip mechanism, did not emerge from protoclips themselves. These practices could be grouped together to form the phase before the first birth of the medium, a so-called prenatal phase (before birth).Of course, almost everything could a posteriori (devirved from observed facts) be said to have influenced the birth of the medium and of course the different birth stages cannot be separated as strictly as one would have it. Still, music television would not have been developed if it were not for the influence of youth culture, a phenomenon popping up during the fifties by which music became the basis of peer group identity. Films as The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando or the various Elvis films helped to spread the early youth culture and lifestyle of Rock'n'roll.
Also within the world of film, the flamboyant musicals of dance director Busby Berkeley with their swooping aerial photography, their kaleidoscopic lenses (continually shifting or rapidly changing), the highly expressive camera movement and the sophisticated montage techniques were influential for the music videos to come, as they turned dance sequences into "experimental cinema of abstract impressionism" (A style or movement in painting originating in France in the 1860s, characterized by a concern with depicting the visual impression of the moment, esp. in terms of the shifting effect of light and color - seeking o capture a feeling or experience rather than to achieve accurate depiction ( description / representative image or illustration ) rather than resembling "traditional narrative film." Also the mickey-mousing process of frame-by-frame synchronization, by which early Disney films achieved to combine "sound and image in an expressive manner impossible (…) in live-action narrative cinema", is echoed by the structuring role music seems to have in music videos of today.
Even the editing practice of directors of Russian Constructivism for whom expressiveness and symbolism were far more important than just telling a story, seems to have been more influential within the music video mechanism than it has been within narrative film. Trough the fast succession of spectacular visual stimuli and a manipulative "montage of attraction",Sergei Eisenstein wished to develop a symbolic, metaphoric and poetic Filmgestalt in the mind op the beholder. This Gestalt (An organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts) was to build an ideal image of the struggle of the collective or individual Soviet hero (the Proletariat, Lenin), a fictitious image that would picture the real essence of communism. Music videos could rightly be argued to do pretty much the same thing, that is, build an ideal and fictitious image of the pop hero in order represent his true essence through means of a manipulative and nonnarrative montage of attraction.
In some ways, music videos also seem to be a return to the cinema of attractions, a term introduced by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault to topically describe the early cinema.This sort of cinema aimed at showing itself exhibitionistically as a spectacular and stunning curiosum??, rather than at telling a story and absorb the voyeuristic audience into it, as would be the case in the later practice of narrative cinema. The nec plus ultra of today's exhibitionistic medium practices seems to be exactly the music video, where it is not so much the medium itself that arouses excitement anymore, but the eye-catching appearances of the star as visual spectacle. Even though the fast clip editing seems miles ahead of the often static tableaus (A GROUP OF PEOPLE ATTRACTIVELY ARRANGED) in early cinema, narrativity remains inferior to the importance of showing the divine capacities of the star.
The notion of cultural form by Raymond Williams enables us to situate the clip as a dynamic and flexible phenomenon, adaptable to the historical and cultural context in which it is viewed. Although Williams takes the apparatus to be part of this context, the producers, the public and the experience are just as important in defining the medium. The apparatus of music videos involves both the technical means of production, with different sorts of cameras and digital postproduction devices, and those of consumption, ranging from television screens over the Internet to DVD-players. The producers are just as diverse, since the star itself, as well as directors and technicians, music mixers, make-up artists and pr-managers from both film and music companies are involved. As far as music video consumers are concerned, they could of course be anyone, but the target group op the medium is the ever renewing MTV-generation, a group of youngsters between fourteen and twenty-five, still in search for the right identity and willing to spend money on it. The most difficult item to define remains the clip-experience, an extremely variable concept, depending on the psychological (characteristics/biology) and cultural background (location, religion, upbringing, political background etc) of the viewer and on the moment of watching, but most of all on the text itself, as one should not underestimate the level to which production teams are able to manipulate stimuli and to guide viewers into the desired affects. As a response, viewers in stead of changing the channel, should stay tuned, buy the cd or imitate dance moves, style and consumption patterns of their admired star.(gangman style! CLEAR EXAMPLE!!)
Added to the notion of cultural form, Stanley Cavell's concept of automatism can bring in the video's specificity, namely its mechanism of star creation.Cavell has defined automatism to be the basis of a medium; a structural formula that has been created within a certain oeuvre (The works of a painter, composer, or author regarded collectively), but proves so productive that it automatically starts reproducing itself in other stances (position / forms / shapes / attitudes?), hence creating the medium. Cavell's medium concept could at first sight be just as easily exchanged for the more common notion of genre, but as genre usually is conceptualized to be a subgroup of a larger medium, that notion would eclipse (destroy) the specificity (specific) of the music video mechanism( machine) .However, before analyzing the mechanism internally, it seems useful to explore the external factors, historical, technological, social and economical, that produced the medium as we know it. The concept of the second birth of a medium by André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion can help to structure the history of music video as a cultural practice, although that history will within the scope of this article necessarily be limited to a crude sketch and the account will contain a fair amount of teleological thinking.
The main idea behind the second birth is that in order to be institutionalized (established) as a real medium, a cultural practice will have to eliminate certain aspects of itself, hence go through a partial (half suicide - only partly committal) suicide and be born again with well-defined aims and a well-structured mechanism (machine). - based upon already existing material in order to gain establishment & popularity - but then have it's own rights? recycled? based upon other mediums? inter-textual?
In the case of the music video, this means that from the wide range of short films to visualize a song or a piece of music, only those that actually were meant to create a star image for the musical performer, would remain within the scope of the medium. I propose to pinpoint this second birth of the music video, which in reality of course happened rather as a gradual process, to the 1 st of august 1981, the day that the music channel MTV started broadcasting in America with the clip "Video Killed the Radio Star".The channel would probably not have been founded if clips did not already exist in the first place, but the worldwide institutionalization of music videos as a medium of promotion, entertainment and art, and the clip mechanism as we know it today, would not have been possible unless something like music television came into being.
Before MTV saw the light, clips had already been shown on television, but the line between what were music videos and what were just filmed performances was not very clear at that time. In the process of medium reincarnation (AN AGENCY OR MEANS OF DOING SOMETHING, NATURE, INFLUENCES, ENVIROMENT) this stage would be termed the first birth. The success of TV-shows in the 1960's such as Bandstand or The Ed Sullivan Show, where popular artists performed their new songs, have been a major impetus (stimulus / forward force - inspiration) for the production of clips, as the most famous performers would soon not be able anymore to attend all the shows. The production of video clips seemed the most convenient solution. Clips turned out to have a broader range of artistic possibilities than the staged performances, as they were not bound to the limits of the spatial and temporal reality on stage. The Beatles' song "Paperbackwriter" is credited for being the first music video ever broadcasted on television. - (OutKast parody this performance with their song 'Hey Ya')
Before these first clips were shown on television, however, the sixties had already witnessed the hype of the Scopitones, "coin-operated entertainment machines featuring visual accompaniment for a musical number". These peephole-devices were to entertain the public in cafés and clubs with music films of about three minutes length and proving to be highly successful. The Scopitones did not necessarily have to feature famous artists singing and could just as easily show exotic tribal dances, stripteases to music or jazz band choreographies. Promotion of a musical number or creation of a star image were at that time still secondary to the attraction, to spectacular entertainment or to satisfying the peepshow desires of the club audiences. It seems to be the case that those priorities would be inversed (functions reversed - one goes up so the other goes down) in later music videos, where spectacular entertainment and striptease allusions would only be linked to the spectacular divinity and the glamorous sex appeal of the star.
The main purpose of music videos has been defined to be the creation of a star, a mixture or human familiarity and divine glamour and in order to achieve the desired star effect, production teams have a whole range of filmic devices at their disposal. It could be rightly claimed that music videos try to create a utopian world (idealised perfection) of which the star seems to be the instigator (the cause). Richard Dyer's Entertainment and Utopia hands over some very useful tools to explain the utopian mechanism in musicals and with some adjustments, these tools could be rightfully applied to the mechanism of the music video. First of all, Dyer argues how in musicals, the development of the narrative is postponed in order for a utopian dance act to break through. When for example Maria in the Sound of Music starts singing about confidence, lonely goaters and other favourite things of hers, utopia seems to emerge. The song is a marker for the opposition between narrative and "utopianact", between the normal world and something of a different order. Dyer indicates that the notion of utopia in musicals rather indicates a feeling, an effect of utopia rather than an ontologically (the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being) or theoretically sketched out world with rules and laws. In both the character in the film and the viewer in the audience, entertainment will achieve imaginary escapism rather than real changes and Dyer makes clear that escapist needs and their proper fulfillments are to a large extend created by the dominant system in which the entertainment operates.
Stars seem to have always been around in one way or another during western history. Ancient Greece had its Olympus, the Middle Ages their saints and later kings were introduced as loci of divinity. They all functioned as incarnations (A person who embodies in the flesh a deity, spirit, or abstract quality) of the ideals of their time, of braveness and power, devotedness (feelings of love) and abstinence (The fact or practice of restraining oneself from indulging in something) or bienséance (propriety - The state or quality of conforming to conventionally accepted standards of behavior or morals.) and courtoisie (courtesy) and hence served as role models for identification. The star system that developed in the twentieth century would not be very different. Film and pop stars were taken to be typical of the average citizen and at the same time superior and special, raised above the masses. They would serve as role models to identify with, but also as sites of escapist dreams about glamour and success. Both types of star phenomena, that of the music star and that of the film star, would in a certain measure come together in the medium of music video, a medium that would not only be a result of the star phenomenon, but that would also become an important mechanism in its creation.
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