Music Videos and Identities: How does your favorite musical artist create music videos? What do their music videos mean? Queerness from Queen to Chappell Roan. The feminisms of Madonna to Megan Thee Stallion. Racial politics from Michael Jackson to Kendric Lamar. These artists created music videos that are aesthetically significant and politically important. But mainstream artists are just part of the story. Independent musicians create music videos that further complicate mainstream musical politics with their sometimes illegible (and therefore radical) representations. In this course, we will consider how music videos from the mainstream to the margins not just express but influence changing racial, gender, and sexual identities across time. We will develop skills for analyzing music, lyrics, and images in music videos to search out the ways artists negotiate issues of aesthetics and power. Music videos satisfy us with the pleasure of listening and watching. How then do music videos leverage that pleasure to resist and reinforce social norms? To answer this question, this course traces trends in representations of identities in music videos.
- Enseignant: Ryan Lambe