Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Music videos have ranged from simple tableaux of a band playing its instruments to multimillion dollar, high-concept extravaganzas. Born of a sudden expansion in new broadcast channels, music videos continue to exert an enormous influence on popular music. They help to create an artist's identity, to affect a song's mood, to determine chart success: the music video has changed our idea of the popular song.

Here at last is a study that treats music video as a distinct multimedia artistic genre, different from film, television, and indeed from the songs they illuminate--and sell. Carol Vernallis describes how verbal, musical, and visual codes combine in music video to create defining representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, and performance. The book explores the complex interactions of narrative, settings, props, costumes, lyrics, and much more. Three chapters contain close analyses of important videos: Madonna's "Cherish," Prince's "Gett Off," and Peter Gabriel's "Mercy St."

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Theory
• Telling and Not Telling
• Editing
• Actors
• Settings
• Props and Costumes
• Interlude: Space, Color, Texture, and Time
• Lyrics
• Musical Parameters
• Connections Among Music, Image, and Lyrics
• Analytical Methods
• Analyses
• The Aesthetics of Music Video: An Analysis of Madonna's "Cherish"
• Desire, Opulence, and Musical Authority: The Relation of Music and Image in Prince's "Gett Off"
• Peter Gabriel's Elegy for Anne Sexton: Image and Music in "Mercy St."
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Vernallis (Wayne State Univ.) provides a successful demonstration of how aspects of music video (narrative, editing, camerawork, and acting as well as musical, visual, and temporal elements) differ from film (especially Hollywood classic cinema). Music videos often have discontinuous narratives, at times they reveal the fourth wall and the production scaffolding. They emphasize many concurrent relationships and ideologies through various graphic matches and camera angles. Vernallis asserts that music videos represent the listener's experience both visually and aurally: when the visual and temporal elements do not provide enough information, the audience turns to the music for answers. These answers reside not simply in the song texts but also in the connections between musical elements (such as rhythm and form) and visual and temporal elements (such as cutting on or off the beat). Though the stills reproduced in this volume are small, they illustrate effectively music video-making techniques. This book provides both significant tools for music-video analysis and a source for popular-music scholars experiencing obstacles in obtaining music videos and copyright permission. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. M. Goldsmith Louisiana State University