Music Video and the Politics of Representation, by Diane Railton and Paul Watson

Abstract

Music Video and the Politics of Representation furnishes a detailed and sustained consideration of music video, a widely circulated and extremely popular form of art that has been almost ignored in academic and critical debate of the past decades. Considering the few studies published during the 1980s and 1990s, Diane Railton and Paul Watson lament the previous critics’ submission of music videos into other paradigms such as theories of the postmodern, cultural politics of race and gender or into analyses of specific performers such as Madonna. This is not a detailed historical record of the academic studies on the subject, but reference to previous works provides a valid and interesting basis for departure of the authors’ own analysis, whose clearly stated goal is the institutionalisation of music video as a form deserving of a study in its own right

Keywords

• music videos
• metaphors of music videos
• varying musical genres