Music Videos Trapped in the Network: A New Aesthetic and Function?

 

Gina Arnold, "Why Psy? Music Video and the Global Market"
Daniel Cookney, "Vimeo Killed The Radio Star: Burial and the User-Generated Music Video"
Carol Vernallis, "YouTube Aesthetics"

More resources:
Carol Vernallis, "Music Video's Second Aesthetic?"
Carol Vernallis, "Reconfiguring Music Video: Beyonce's 'Video Phone'"

Extra Reading:
Carol Vernallis, "Viral Web Media and the Obama Campaign"

How To Watch Television Articles

Here is the link to the articles from the 2nd edition of Mittell & Thompson's How To Watch Television.

Here you will find the readings from the 1st edition that were not included in this new one. There are still some quite useful readings.

Look at the 2nd Edition's Table of Contents here.

If you want to take a look at any of the other articles from How To Watch Television find them at this link.

Complex TV and the Future of Narratives

Complex TV Basics

from Jason Mittell's Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling
--Chapter 1: Complexity in Context

Aymar Jean Christian, "High Maintenance and The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl: Indie TV"
from Ethan Thompson & Jason Mittell (eds), How To Watch Television; 2nd Ed. (NYU, 2020)

I will be posting episodes of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Insecure, Atlanta, Master of None, The Show About The Show, High Maintenance (Vimeo), High Maintenance (HBO), Baskets, Horace and Pete, SKAM (Norway/Italy/US) in addition to the links below.


Article on the original SKAM that aired in Norway on public broadcaster and on social media NRK TV here.


(Blocked Trailer here.)

Find the clips from Season 4 of SKAM here. 

(nb. Final episodes are at the top of the page so you should scroll down to find earlier ones)

Below you can find the Pilot, "Why Did We Greenlight This?", for Caveh Zahedi's The Show About The Show which 'aired' on the BricTV network on YouTube. Relate this to the concept of Complex TV. We will be watching more of this show during the week.

Some career advice from Baskets College below.

Complex TV and the Future of Narratives

Post-Rock, Subcultures Gender & Sexuality: The End of Discourses of Authenticity

At this point you should be moving forward towards completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the final weeks:

On 'co-optation':
Thomas Frank's "Commodify Your Dissent" here.

On Jamaican Music:
from Dick Hebdige, Cut'n'Mix here.



On Gender:
Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, "Rock and Sexuality"
Simon Frith, "Afterthoughts"
"Richard Dyer, "In Defense of Disco"
Find these articles here as a single PDF file.

Lindsay Zoladz, "Joni Mitchell: Fear of a Female Genius"


On 'sub-cultures':
Here are the Dick Hebdige chapters from Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Refer back to the Punk: Attitude film screening.

On sampling, music videos, remix culture and the 'postmodern turn':
Andrew Goodwin, "Sample and Hold"
E Ann Kaplan, "A Postmodern Play of the Signifier?"

Also, to clarify (or further obscure) 'postmodernism' please help yourself --in case you have not encountered it in your other studies-- to Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society"

TV After TV: Global Media Trade, Formats and Channel Branding

Brennan, "A Political Economy of Formatted Pleasures"
Torre, "Reversal of Fortune?: Hollywood Faces New Competition in Global Media Trade"
from Oren & Shahaf (eds), Global Television Formats: Understanding Television Across Borders (Routledge, 2012)

Chap.1: "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"
Chap.2: "From Channel Brands to Service Brands: US Television Enters the Digital Era"
from Catherine Johnson, Branding Television (Routledge, 2012)



Also, if you are interested in the intersection of technology, creativity, production practices and televisual style make sure you follow Ben Consoli's GO Creative Podcast (and Blog). You'll find episodes in the artchive where Consoli interviews the DP for House of Cards, has an in depth conversation with Shane Reynolds, a true one-man band/jack of all trades who produces, shoots and edits his work all on his own for the Travel Network, Nat Geo and others and also speaks with Chris Manley, the cinematographer and DP for Mad Men. Great insights on how network pressures and studio concerns with the bottom line all line up with technological possibilities and stylistic choices.

Matthias Leupold, Im Kino / In the Cinema, Part II Berlin GDR, 1983

Baudrillard, "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media"

Additional Recommended Baudrillard Readings:
Jean Baudrillard, Requiem for the Media
Jean Baudrillard, The Implosion of Meaning in the Media from Simulacra and Simulation

The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow.

Please read the section 'Disciplines and Sciences of the Individual' in Part II, particularly the first four segments (from "The Body of the Condemned" to "Panopticism")

Foucault, "The Repressive Hypothesis" from The History of Sexuality, Vol. I

In the clip below the scene discussed in the first pages of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism.
from Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaròn, US/UK, 2006)





ENJOY POVERTY by RENZO MARTENS 

I will be posting the link for Renzo Martens' Enjoy Poverty on Moodle.

The readings below are not part of the reading requirements but they are helpful in contextualizing and helping you come to terms with Enjoy Poverty. Please take a look at them, particularly the interview with Martens and the Susan Sontag essay on 'looking at war'.

"Enjoy Poverty: Disclosing the Political Impasse of Contemporary Art" in Art Papers

-an interview with Renzo Martens

Paul O'Kane, "Renzo Martens: Episode III" review in Third Text, 2009

T.J. Demos, "Poverty Pornography, Humanitarianism and Neo-Liberal Globalization: Notes on Some Paradoxes in Contemporary Art"

Bonus Interview from the "Africa is a Country Blog" here.

Bonus Reading:

Susan Sontag, "Looking At War/Regarding the Pain of Others"

Faster! Faster! Faster!

#Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics (Srnicek & Williams)

Steven Shaviro, "What is Accelerationism?" from No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Bonus:

Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (Laboria Cuboniks)

+

What About 'Today'?

Christian Fuchs, "Participatory Web 2.0 as Ideology" from Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies

McKenzie Wark, The Hacker Manifesto

"Every single commodity you produce is a piece of your own death"
"Withdrawing in disgust is not the same thing as apathy."

The 'Post' Archipelago: A Brief Intro

Young Jacques Derrida's English Comp Essay
Note the teacher's comments. Do they still apply to Jacques' adult writing? Read 'Différance' below to find out.

Some introductory readings to the various 'posts' that we will be reading in the next weeks. Having concluded our discussion of structuralism, here is some material to bring us towards the post-structuralist theoretical framework. Remember that a good exercise for us is to read the theories in their original form. As you read get a sense of the language, of the rhetorical processes, of the way the argument proceeds. I am including here, in addition to the Roland Barthes essay on "The Death of the Author" also a brief introduction to poststructuralism, postmodernism and postcolonial studies (the pdf has these entries in alphabetical order but please read them in the order above). I've also included Derrida's 'Différance' --this is a bonus reading but I would urge all of you to tackle it in order to get that sense of the language mentioned above so that we may talk about it in class. Enjoy.

"poststructuralism"; "postmodernism"; "postcolonial studies" entries
from A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory; 2nd Ed. (Wiley-Blackwell)

Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" from Image/Music/Text

David Harvey, "Postmodernism" from The Condition of Postmodernity

Jacques Derrida, Différance

Music Video Auteurs, Music Genres and the End of MTV: Surveillance, Discrete Programming, Reality Shows

Saul Austerlitz, "Visions of a Youth Culture" + "Spike and Michel" from Money For Nothing: A History of the Music Video from The Beatles to The White Stripes (Continuum, 2008)

Roger Beebe, "Paradoxes of Pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the Race of the Postmodern Auteur" from Beebe & Middleton (eds), Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (Duke, 2007)

You can find a treasure trove of AUTEUR based organized video playlists here.

Individual auteurs are linked below. The "Spike and Michel" of Saul Austerlitz's chapter above are Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry.

Spike Jonze
Michel Gondry
Chris Cunningham

Hype Williams 
Paul Hunter

The TV Show That Ate Times Square

How the original Total Request Live created the boy-band boom, saved MTV (for a while), and filled midtown with screaming teenagers.

"Inside Total Request Live: MTV's Hottest Program for Teens" from PBS Frontline, 2001

For Those About To Rock: Return of the Aura

Frank Zappa & Captain Beefheart

"I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"

-Jack Kerouac

-Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

Here are a couple of articles to integrate Keightley's Reconsidering Rock article. The first Frith article is required; the second article is a highly recommended read. Enjoy the Lester Bangs reviews from Creem. Reebee Garofalo's article on Soul ("Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement") is required.

Simon Frith - "Rock and Popular Culture"
Simon Frith - "The Magic The Can Set You Free": The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community
Paul Clarke - "'A Magic Science': Rock Music as a Recording Art"
Lester Bangs - Various Record Reviews from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
Reebee Garofalo - Popular Music and the Civil Rights Movement

Also, here is Andrew Chester's "For A Rock Aesthetic", Richard Merton's response, "Comments" and Chester's response to the response, "Second Thoughts on a Rock Aesthetic: The Band". It's all from the Jan/Feb1970 #59 issue of New Left Review.

Please read in 'Rocking Out' up to and including Chapter 8.

Playlists and clips on Moodle.

AC/DC, Let There Be Rock (1977) 

Reverend Bon tells you all about it. As you can see the 'aura' is back around Angus' head.

Structuralism 101 - Goodbye to Innocence

"Structuralist Theories" from Selden et al. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 3rd Edition (Prentice Hall, 1985)

Below are some very basic intro articles on Semiotics and the media for those that need a refresher/recap:

Mieke Bal, Semiotics for Beginners
Scott McCloud, from Understading Comics: Chapter 2, Semiotics
Jonathan Bignell, Media Semiotics: Introduction + The Cinema

"Beneath the cobblestones, the beach": Theory, Alternative Media, Situationism and Cultural Resistance

 

 

How To Talk Like A Situationist

Guy Debord - Report on the Construction of Situations and on the International Situationist Tendency's Conditions of Organization and Action (1957)

If you are interested in reading more of the Situationist International's documents, manifestos and screeds (they are always fun, engaging and inspiring) you can find an excellent selection in the anthology edited by Tom McDonough and published by MIT Press titled Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Modern day situationists have made the book available here. Of course all of the Situationist documents are also available online at the Situationist Online Archive which is a true treasure trove of material. There are many other sources for Situationist materials freely available online, a direct result of the 'proto-free culture' approach the Situationist International always promoted.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger - Constituents of a Theory of the Media (1970)

Extra:
John Downing - Radical Media in Italy

The In-Between Years (or The Empire Strikes Back)

In the playlist below some of the genres that were popular during the so-called 'in-between years': Girl Groups, different kinds of Phil Spector produced records, the uptown RnB of Motown Records, Surf and Hot Rod combos and the different iterations of the folk revival.

As you listen consider the following records by two of the most popular of the Girl Groups:

The Ronettes, "Be My Baby"
The Crystals, "Then He Kissed Me"
The Crystals, "Da Doo Ron Ron"

These records were written by the same pair of songwriters, Cynthia Weill and Barry Mann and produced by Phil Spector as he was building his wall of sound.

Then compare these to Lesley Gore's "It's My Party" which is still a Weill/Mann song but was NOT produced by Phil Spector.

Finally consider these records with Spector's wall of sound in full-effect:

Ike & Tina Turner, "River Deep, Mountain High"
The Righteous Brothers, "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling"

Be ready to identify the characteristics of Spector's production style.

General In-Between The Years playlist here. Specific playlists linked below.

• Phil Spector Productions
• The Wrecking Crew! : Tracks Recorded by the Wrecking Crew
• Brill Building Songwriters: Goffin/King
• Brill Building Songwriters: Mann/Weill
• Brill Building Songwriters: Greewich/Barry
• Girl Groups Playlist
• Motown: Mainly Holland-Dozier-Holland

Readings:
Keightley, "Reconsidering Rock"

nb. We will discuss the issues and concepts raised in it after the exam. I do however urge you to read it as it offers a lot of points that would help your review and understanding of material tied to the 'in-between years'.

In Garofalo you should read up to and including Chapter 6.

Phil Spector

Advertising and Audiences: Assessment, Interactivity, Heatmaps, Analytics and Chatter

 

The following are good background readings about network and transition era audience assessment methods and the ways in which the prerogatives of the advertiser-network relations are key in producing an understanding of audiences. For this they also offer a good reflection and analysis of the ways in which audience assessment are used in developing a political and regulatory environment for media systems in general and television in particular.

Meehan, The Blame Game
Meehan, Don't Blame The Viewers

Ang, The Nature of the Audience
Gandy, Tracking the Audience

The Audience Response Heatmap from Bluefin

Andrejevic, The Twenty-First-Century Telescreen
Marshall, Screens: Television's Dispersed 'Broadcast'

McChesney, What is the Elephant in the Digital Room? from Digital Disconnect

Harrington, Tweeting About the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media

Refer to Jon Gertner's epigraph in Chapter 6 of The Television Will Be Revolutionized:

"Finding out whether ''C.S.I.'' beats ''Desperate Housewives'' is just the beginning. Change the way you count, for instance, and you can change where the advertising dollars go, which in turn determines what shows are made and what shows then are renewed. Change the way you count, and potentially you change the comparative value of entire genres (news versus sports, dramas versus comedies) as well as entire demographic segments (young versus old, men versus women, Hispanic versus black). Change the way you count, and you might revalue the worth of sitcom stars, news anchors and -- when a single ratings point can mean millions of dollars -- the revenue of local affiliates and networks alike. Counting differently can even alter the economics of entire industries, should advertisers (thanks to the P.P.M.) discover that radio or the Web is a better way to get people to know their brand or buy their products or even vote for their political candidates. Change the way you measure America's culture consumption, in other words, and you change America's culture business. And maybe even the culture itself."

The complete Jon Gertner (from The New York Times Magazine), "Our Ratings, Ourselves" here.

A recent Toby Miller blogpost, "TV is Dead" chock full of nice links and statistics about TV consumption.

Digital Delights and Disturbances: De-Platformisation, Thursday Feb. 25 @6pm

 

Send email to ddd@johncabot.edu to register and receive Zoom link.

 

 The first Net Neutrality video. June 2014

 Tom Wheeler, FCC Chairman, denies he is a dingo. June 2014

 Obama Steps In. November 2014

R'n'R or Transubstantiated RnB?

Addendum to Net Neutrality - THE DISNEY FOX COMCAST CLUSTERF*%K

 

All you need to know about Fox, Comcast and Disney's battle to own Sky

Comcast Wisely Throws In The Towel On Fox Deal, Focusing On Sky

Disney Wins U.S. Approval for Fox Deal in Blow to Comcast

Disney's Fox deal gets China's approval

More Net Neutrality News: The Trump Edition

 

An Anti-Consumer Agenda at the F.C.C.

Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules

U.S. telecommunications regulator closes 'sponsored data' probe

FCC to vote on advanced U.S. broadcast TV standards

New FCC chair vows to shrink industry regulations

FCC led by Trump pick starts to reverse Obama policies

Say Good-bye to the Last Pillar of the Free, Open Internet

Net Neutrality & Comcast: We (Almost) Own Everything...No, Really, We Do -- The First Big Fight

 

Four Infographics Reveal Why the Comcast Merger Is Bad for You

The Comcast-Time Warner Deal, by the Numbers

Netflix To Pay Comcast to Not Ruin Your Evenings

Why YouTube buffers: The secret deals that make—and break—online video

Comcast claims competition from Google Fiber, Netflix & Hulu are reasons to approve merger

Netflix Quality Sucks Because ISPs Won't Bother Fixing It

The Real Problem with the Comcast Merger

Here's Your MTV: Music Television In Full Effect

 

David E. James, "The Beatles: Richard Lester and A Hard Day's Night"
Benjamin Olin, "TV Party: A Cocktail Party That Could Also Be A Political Party"

The History: Technological and Industrial Change:
Steve Jones, "MTV: The Medium was the Message"
John Mundy, "I Want My MTV...and my Movies With Music"
Catherine Johnson, "Deregulation, Differentiation and Niche Targeting: The Emergence of Branding in the Cable/Satellite Era"

The Theory: Music Videos and Postmodernism:
Andrew Goodwin, "Fatal Distractions: MTV Meets Postmodern Theory"
Will Straw, "Music Video In Its Contexts: Popular Music and Postmodernism in the 1980s"
E. Ann Kaplan, "A Post-Modern Play of the Signifier? Advertising, Pastiche and Schizophrenia in Music Television"
Andrew Goodwin, "From Anarchy to Chromakey: Developments in Music Television"

Bonus:
Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture"

Julie Lobalzo Wright, "The Boy Kept Swinging: David Bowie, Music Video and the Star Image"

Synthesizing Modernity: Teddy and Walt in The New Yorker

 

The Naysayers: Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and the Critique of Pop Culture
by Alex Ross

Even the New Yorker catches up:

"One way or another, the Frankfurt School mode of criticism—its skeptical ardor, its relentless scouring of mundane surfaces—has spread far. When online recappers expend thousands of words debating the depiction of rape on “Game of Thrones,” or when writers publish histories of sneakers or of the office cubicle, they show intense awareness of mass culture’s ability to shape society. And in some cases the analysis takes a recognizably dialectical turn, as in Hua Hsu’s 2011 essay, for Grantland, on Kanye West and Jay-Z’s album “Watch the Throne.” A dispassionate hip-hop fan, Hua Hsu ponders the spectacle of two leading rappers making an “album against austerity,” in which they mark their ascension to a world of “MoMA and Rothko, Larry Gagosian, and luxury hotels across three continents,” and at the same time forfeit a hip-hop tradition of fantasy and protest. Citing the Kanye track “Power”—“Grab a camera, shoot a viral / Take the power in your own hands”—Hsu writes, “This version of power is entrancing—it explains an entire generation. But it also confuses ubiquity for importance, the familiarity of a celebrity’s face for true authority.” There is no telling how Adorno and Benjamin might have negotiated such contemporary labyrinths. Perhaps, on a peaceful day, they would have accepted the compromise devised by Fredric Jameson, who has written that the “cultural evolution of late capitalism” can be understood “dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.”

These implacable voices should stay active in our minds. Their dialectic of doubt prods us to pursue connections between what troubles us and what distracts us, to see the riven world behind the seamless screen. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”: Benjamin’s great formula, as forceful as a Klieg light, should be fixed as steadily on pop culture, the ritual apparatus of American capitalism, as it has been on the art works of the European bourgeoisie. Adorno asked for only so much. Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”"

Whitey's Lindy Hoppers: Something Wild

 

This is the Lindy Hop, the Jitterbug, the Suzie-Q. The clip is an excerpt from H.C. Potter's Helzapoppin' (1941). The Lindy Hoppers doing "The Big Apple" in 1939 are here. Enjoy.
In this clip the dancing starts at the 2:15 mark.



from Jonathan Demme's Something Wild; The Feelies play David Bowies's "Fame" and Jeff Daniels dances with his eye on the 'Other' for cues.

Groovy Movie (1944): Instructional Video for the Lindy Hop