Music Video and the Politics of Representation

MUSIC AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Series Editor: Kevin Donnelly

This series explores the area of 'screen music'. Volume topics include multimedia music, music and television, and Hollywood film music.

'Music Video and the Politics of Representation provides an essential contribution to the literature, offering new ways of thinking about narrative, genre, representation and form. Especially valuable are its case studies, which consider videos that share musical styles or mode of address: here music video's oddness comes forward, its unexpected, shifting and quirky meanings. This book is an important addition that will help initiate a renaissance of scholarship on the genre.'

Carol Vernallis, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

How can we engage critically with music video and its role in popular culture? What do contemporary music videos have to tell us about patterns of cultural identity today?

Based around an eclectic series of vivid case studies, this fresh and timely examination is an entertaining and enlightening analysis of the forms, pleasures and politics that music videos offer. In rethinking some classic approaches from film studies and popular music studies and connecting them with new debates about the current 'state' of feminism and feminist theory, Railton and Watson show why and how we should be studying music videos in the twenty-first century.

Through its thorough overview of the music video as a visual medium, this is an ideal textbook for Media Studies students and all those with an interest in popular music and cultural studies.

Key Features

• Provides a framework for how to describe and analyse a music video
• Uses case studies from internationally well-know artists, such as Kylie, Shakira and Beyoncé, to explore issues of representation of gender, sexuality and ethnicity
• Draws on classic and contemporary videos from a ra