Blogpost Assignment No. 3: Music, Image, Sound, Screen
We take YouTube for granted nowadays. We’re able to access millions of videos, ranging from the infamous “Pizza Rat” to Doug the Pug’s rendition of Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” at the click of a button. The music video, while no longer limited to MTV and VH1, has become a work of art in its own right. In the age of YouTube, Vimeo, and Snapchat, how can we understand music as a full bodied, multisensory experience?
This post asks you to analyze one music video by any artist of your choosing to explore the ways that music, image, sound, and screen come together to create a powerful experience. This video can be of any stylistic or generic origin: popular, experimental, classical, etc. Maybe you want to look at exoticist elements in Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” video. Or perhaps you’re interested in how the Metropolitan Opera makes previews of upcoming productions. Maybe you’re into film music and would like analyze a movie trailer’s soundtrack. The possibilities are numerous.
With YouTube videos come YouTube comments—and the potential for both brilliant insight and terrible trolling. As an additional part of this assignment, I want you to do a preliminary scan of the comments attached to the video of your choice. How are people reacting to sound and image? What might their reactions tell you about the politics of performance, the role of video technology, or the mediation of the internet (and the security of anonymity)? Choose at least three comments to incorporate that either supplement or complicate your analysis of the music video. Why should we believe your take over that of HorseLover123? What does a pejorative comment about Yuja Wang’s outfit in a recorded performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto tell us about the status of women in classical music? Be creative, yet critical.