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

Study Guide is here. 

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"

Discrete Programming, Music Video Auteurs and the End of MTV

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

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

Music Video Links and Playlist

Here are the links to the videos:

You can find the Youtube Playlist with a selection of the material we have been watching in class here.

Embedded below is the brief documentary we started watching that should help you clarify and contextualize the emergence of MTV and assist you with what we covered in lecture and the different readings assigned.

I will be distribute the study guide for the midterm quiz during class, on Monday, so that we can go over it and I can answer questions you might have in regards to format and the whatever else.
I did, however, decide that the midterm will be on Thursday, rather than Wednesday.

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"

I Want My MTV: You'll Have To Wait For It

Sunil Manghani, "The Pleasures of (Music) Video"
from Arnold et al (eds), Music/Video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Mathias Korsgaard, "Defining Music Video"
from Korsgaard, Music Video After MTV: Audiovisual Studies, New Media and Popular Music (Routledge, 2017)

Welcome to Summer I 2019 - Music Video

SKAM + The Show About The Show + FINAL STUDY GUIDE QUESTIONS

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.

FINAL EXAM STUDY GUIDE here. Enjoy.

Some career advice from Baskets College below.

COM 470 Advanced Media Theory Final Study Guide

After the wise and profound words of Father Guido, words which are so perfectly comforting during exam crunch times, here is the much agonized for study guide:

COM 470 Study Guide

Popular Music Final Paper Prompts

Have fun. Like the kids above.

Pop Music Final Paper

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, "Reconfiguring Music Video: Beyonce's 'Video Phone'"

Carol Vernallis, "Music Video's Second Aesthetic?"
Carol Vernallis, "Viral Web Media and the Obama Campaign"

Carol Vernallis, "YouTube Aesthetics"

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


SKAM

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

Announcement of Skam/Shame US, set in Austin and released on Facebook Watch
SKAM Austin: Release Date, Trailer, and News

(Blocked Trailer here.)

Post-Rock, Subcultures and the End of Authenticity

Assuming that at this point you should be on your way to completing the Garofalo textbook, here are the reading assignments for the final three 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.

The Ramones, "Rockaway Beach" Live in Rome, 1980




On sampling, mash-ups 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"

Fatal Strategies & Slackers: Withdrawing or Accelerating?

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

The screening of ENJOY POVERTY will be on Wednesday April 17 @7.30pm in GG1 Guarini Campus. Please look for readings related to the screening in the post below.

This is mandatory viewing for ALL students in COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory

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)






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."

Screenings: EPISODE III: ENJOY POVERTY by Renzo Martens @7.30pm on Wednesday, April 17 in GG1

Screening will be on Wednesday, April 17 @7.30pm in GG1 Guarini Campus.
This is mandatory viewing for ALL students in COM 470 Advanced Communication Theory.


"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"

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)

Bonus Article:
"Why HBO Passed on The Walking Dead" from Mother Nature Blog.

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.