Music videos are available on more channels, in more formats, and in more countries than ever before. While MTV—the network that introduced music video to most viewers—is moving away from music video programming, other media developments signal the longevity and dynamism of the form. Among these are the proliferation of niche-based cable and satellite channels, the globalization of music video production and programming, and the availability of videos not just on television but also via cell phones, DVDs, enhanced CDs, PDAs, and the Internet. In the context of this transformed media landscape, Medium Cool showcases a new generation of scholarship on music video. Scholars of film, media, and music revisit and revise existing research as they provide historically and theoretically expansive new perspectives on music video as a cultural form.

The essays take on a range of topics, including questions of authenticity, the tension between high-art influences and mass-cultural appeal, the prehistory of music video, and the production and dissemination of music videos outside the United States. Among the thirteen essays are a consideration of how the rapper Jay-Z uses music video as the primary site for performing, solidifying, and discarding his various personas; an examination of the recent emergence of indigenous music video production in Papua New Guinea; and an analysis of the cultural issues being negotiated within Finland’s developing music video industry. Contributors explore precursors to contemporary music videos, including 1950s music television programs such as American Bandstand, Elvis’s internationally broadcast 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert, and different types of short musical films that could be viewed in “musical jukeboxes” of the 1940s and 1960s. Whether theorizing music video in connection to postmodernism or rethinking the relation between sound and the visual image, the essays in Medium Cool reveal music video as rich terrain for further scholarly investigation.

Contributors. Roger Beebe, Norma Coates, Kay Dickinson, Cynthia Fuchs, Philip Hayward, Amy Herzog, Antti-Ville Kärjä, Melissa McCartney, Jason Middleton, Lisa Parks, Kip Pegley, Maureen Turim, Carol Vernallis, Warren Zanes

Roger Beebe is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Florida. He is a coeditor of Rock Over the Edge: Transformations in Popular Music Culture, also published by Duke University Press. Jason Middleton is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the English Department at the University of Rochester.

  

  

  

  

Introduction / Jason Middleton and Roger Beebe 1
Music Video and Synaesthetic Possibility / Kay Dickinson 13
Illustrating Music: The Impossible Embodiments of the Jukebox Film / Amy Herzog 30
The Audio-Vision of Found-Footage Film and Video / Jason Middleton 59
Art/Music/Video.com / Maureen Turim 83
Strange People, Weird Objects: The Nature of Narrativity, Character, and Editing in Music Videos / Carol Vernallis 111
Dancing to a Pacific Beat: Music Video in Papua New Guinea / Philip Hayward 152
Visions of a Sound Nation: Finnish Music Videos and Secured Otherness / Antti-Ville Karja 174
“Coming to You Wherever You Are”: Exploring the Imagined Communities of Muchmusic (Canada) and MTV (United States) / Kip Pegley 200
Elvis from the Waist Up and Other Myths: 1950s Music Television and the Gendering of Rock Discourse / Norma Coates 226
Elvis Goes Global: Aloha! Elvis Live Via Satellite and Music/Tourism/Television / Lisa Parks and Melissa McCartney 252
Video and the Theater of Purity / Warren Zanes 269
“I’m From Rags to Riches”: The Death of Jay-Z / Cynthia Fuchs 290
Paradoxes of Pastiche: Spike Jonze, Hype Williams, and the Race of the Postmodern Auteur / Roger Beebe 303
Bibliography 329
Contributors 341
Index 345