Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Sound and Vision is the first significant collection of new and classic texts on video and brings together some of the leading international cultural and music critics writing today.
Addressing one of the most controversial forms of popular culture in the contemporary world, Sound and Vision confronts easy interpretations of music video - as promotional vehicles, filmic images and postmodern culture - to offer a new and bold understanding of its place in pop music, television and the media industries. The book acknowledges the history of the commercial status of pop music as a whole, as well as its complex relations with other media. Sound and Vision will be an essential text for students of popular music and popular culture.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The editors who selected the ten readings that make up Sound and Vision have impeccable credentials. Frith has been writing on popular music and culture since 1978 and has edited several books, including On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word (1990) with Andrew Goodwin. Goodwin's own Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture (CH, May'93) is the authoritative text on this subject. Grossberg has been writing on rock for eight years. They have included contributions from seven relatively new music/culture critics to advance the discussion of videos from a single-minded concern with sex and violence to placing the pervasive impact of music television in a much broader context. One reading, for example, discusses the way television commercials have adapted/adopted rock video format. Others address female-male gender issues and chronicle the rise in country music videos. The tone of Sound and Vision is scholarly; its notes, references, and indexes are well suited to academic use. Recommended for upper-level undergraduate and graduate popular music and cultural studies courses.