This chapter encourages scholars to listen again to music video. While music videos are often defined as moving images synchronized to a song, they have frequently incorporated sounds associated with cinematic sound design—sound effects, dialogue, and score—that are not part of the featured song(s). Even when a particular song remains central to a music video’s sonic address, it is often rearranged or extended to emphasize elements within the audiovisual mix. Through case studies featuring Logic, Janet Jackson, and the work of Jonathan Glazer, this chapter explores three key functions of cinematic sound in music video: building a fuller narrative, reinforcing the atmosphere or mood of the song, and subverting or challenging the song’s ostensible meaning. These motivations are not mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive; rather, this critical framework is offered as a means of opening up a larger conversation about the interplay between music video and cinematic sound.
Music videos continue to be one of the most adaptable forms of media due to their unique ability to remediate everything from Western films to Zoom meetings. Their relatively low budgets and ever flexible assemblages of audiovisual components make them sites for experimentation, and they regularly recombine generic conventions from a range of media. This essay makes the case that studying music video demands a multifaceted approach to genre: if we accept that music video is a moving assemblage of genres and media, we can move toward unpacking the unique configurations of genre and medium in a given music video or subset of music videos. This method might suggest a shift in the way we think through genre in the future, moving away from single genre studies (however expansive or changeable a given genre might be) and toward studies that treat genre in a more recombinatory way.
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