Written by: Kaja Sunde

As music videos after, and to some extent, during the MTV era can be positioned as an anomalous media form, this post will focus on the engagement of digital technologies through the medium and the new way of storytelling.

Carol Vernallis dives into her term ‘intensified audiovisual aesthetics’ in her article from 2013, where she connects the term to the statement that ‘post-classical’ films break with the previous older practices, amongst others in terms of aesthetics (Vernallis 2013: 33). As she furthermore mentions, the differences one can find in music videos that are years apart, not only 30 but also 10 years, are the undergoing shifts of style, performance, formal conceits, and, of course, editing (Vernallis 2013: 207). A great example of these new ways of style and editing is Coldplay’s Up&Up music video from 2015, a music video where the main focus is the editing and visual effects correlated into the video in sync with the music:

One of the shifts that music videos have undergone in the past years is the shift from television to internet – one that allows for a different set of both rules and opportunities. Although Coldplay’s Up&Up might not be the most hair-raising of them all in terms of controversiality, it explores the digitalisation that Vernallis discusses in her article. In addition, an example mentioned by Gina Arnold is the music video for Thriller by Michael Jackson, one that opened doors to new dimensions when considering the achievement music videos can have (Arnold 2017: 215). As in Thriller, Up&Up challenges the business model of music videos and its storytelling through exaggerated sizes, unrealistic placement of certain elements (a turtle flying in the air), and historic features to portray the story of the world in which Up&Up takes place. As films abandoned the external ‘narrators’ when they started creating specific codes for a new form of representation and cinematic experience, this also intervened with the making of music videos, as perfectly portrayed in Up&Up (Arnold 2017: 216).

References:

Arnold, G. (2017): Music/video: Histories, Aesthetics, Media

Bloomsbury Academic, 1-304, EAN 9781501313929 

Vernallis, C. (2013): Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema

Oxford University Press, 1-354, EAN 9780199322176