Music Video Theory

Music Video: theory

There are a range of important theories we need to learn as part of our Music Video unit.

Both our Music Video Close-Study Products contain representations of black Americans. We therefore need to study a range of theories that address the representation of black or minority ethnic people in the media.

Notes from the lesson

Paul Gilroy: The Black Atlantic

Paul Gilroy is a key theorist in A Level Media and has written about race in both the UK and USA.

In The Black Atlantic (1993), Gilroy explores influences on black culture. One review states: “Gilroy’s ‘black Atlantic’ delineates a distinctively modern, cultural-political space that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but is, rather, a hybrid mix of all of these at once.”

Gilroy is particularly interested in the idea of black diasporic identity – the feeling of never quite belonging or being accepted in western societies even to this day.

For example, Gilroy points to the slave trade as having a huge cultural influence on modern America – as highlighted by Common’s Letter to the Free.

Diaspora: A term that originates from the Greek word meaning “dispersion,” diaspora refers to the community of people that migrated from their homeland. [Source: facinghistory.org]

Gilroy on black music

Gilroy suggests that black music articulates diasporic experiences of resistance to white capitalist culture. 

When writing about British diasporic identities, Gilroy discusses how many black Britons do not feel like they totally belong in Britain but are regarded as ‘English’ when they return to the country of their parents’ birth e.g. the Caribbean or Africa. This can create a sense of never truly belonging anywhere.

Additional theories on race representations and music

Stuart Hall: race representations in media

Stuart Hall suggests that audiences often blur race and class which leads to people associating particular races with certain social classes.

He suggests that western cultures are still white dominated and that ethnic minorities in the media are misinterpreted due to underlying racist tendencies. BAME people are often represented as ‘the other’.

Hall outlined three black characterisations in American media:

·               The Slave figure: “the faithful fieldhand… attached and devoted to ‘his’ master.” (Hall 1995)

·               The Native: primitive, cheating, savage, barbarian, criminal.

·               The Clown/Entertainer: a performer – “implying an ‘innate’ humour in the black man.” (Hall 1995)

https://youtu.be/Ouhdtrmzenw

Tricia Rose: Black Noise (1994)

 

Tricia Rose was one of the first academics to study the cultural impact of the hip hop genre in her influential book Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994).

Rose suggested that hip hop initially gave audiences an insight into the lives of young, black, urban Americans and also gave them a voice (including empowering female artists). However, Rose has since criticised commercial hip hop and suggests black culture has been appropriated and exploited by capitalism.

Michael Eric Dyson: Know What I Mean (2007)

Georgetown University Professor of Sociology Michael Eric Dyson has passionately defended both hip hop and black culture – Jay-Z describes him as “the hip hop intellectual”.

 https://youtu.be/q6rBbT2UktU

Dyson suggests that political hip hop in the 1990s didn’t get the credit (or commercial success) it deserved and this led to the rap music of today – which can be flashy, sexualised and glamorising criminal behaviour.

Dyson states: “Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such critics. Sadly, the enlightened aspects of hip hop are overlooked by critics who are out to satisfy a grudge against black youth culture…” Michael Eric Dyson, Know What I Mean (2007)


Hip hop debate - full video
This appears to be the full Google debate on hip hop if you want to watch more from where those extracts came from.


Music Video theory - blog tasks

https://youtu.be/q6rBbT2UktU

Childish Gambino, the musical stage name of writer and performer Donald Glover, has just released a critique of American culture and Donald Trump with This Is America.

Racking up 10m views in 24 hours and already dubbed ‘genius’ and ‘a masterpiece’, the music video is a satirical comment on American culture, racism and gun violence.

Create a blogpost called 'Music video: theory', watch the video again then answer the questions below:


1) How does the This Is America video meet the key conventions of a music video?

• The style (performance, concept, narrative).
• The camera.
• The editing techniques (transitions, fast, slow).
• The sound effects (non diegetic, diegetic).
• Mise-en-scene (props, lighting, costume, hair, makeup, locations, setting, colours).

2) What comment is the video making on American culture, racism and gun violence?

• The video is showing how America allows for public brutality as well as racism and actually promotes in their media.

3) Write an analysis of the video applying the theories we have learned: Gilroy, Hall, Rose and Dyson. 

• The music video This is America by Childish Gambino clearly applies Gilroy's theory when see the Jim Crow position of his body in the beginning of the video.
• The way that Staurt Hall’s theory applies to the video is through the use of the “clown/entertainer”  being himself.
• Rose theory early theory on hip hop applies to this music videos due to the fact that the video contains explicit and implicit meaning about race and violence to educate the public .

Read this Guardian feature on This Is America - including the comments below.
4) What are the three interpretations suggested in the article?

• Glover uses grotesque smiles and exaggerated poses, with some on Twitter suggesting this is an invocation of the racial caricature Jim Crow.
• Glover was accusing black performers – even himself – of “coonery”, or saying they are still made to feel like minstrels when they go out to perform their “black” music.
• Without music life would be a mistake, as Nietzsche once said. He also said "...it's principal task is to lead our thoughts to higher things, to elevate, even to make us tremble…" This certainly is the case here, it's outstanding to me. People tend to make decisions based on emotions not fact so music is the perfect medium to highlight the wrongs in society.

5) What alternative interpretations of the video are offered in the comments 'below the line’

• "The Artist’s Sense of Truth. With regard to recognition of truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker; he will on no account let himself be deprived of brilliant and profound interpretations of life, and defends himself against temperate and simple methods and results. He is apparently fighting for the higher worthiness and meaning of mankind; in reality he will not renounce the most effective suppository for his art, the fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the over-valuation of personality, the belief that genius is something miraculous; he considers, therefore, the continuance of his art of creation as more important than the scientific devotion to truth in every shape, however simple this may appear." Human All Too Human, 146.