ABSTRACT

This chapter explains how writers can approach music videos, offering practical strategies for analyzing the formal and narrative elements of music videos and emphasizing the value of collaborative approaches to music video analysis. Music videos on YouTube are how young people most commonly consume popular music. And the genre’s aesthetics are shared with many other forms of moving media, including commercials, YouTube clips, trailers, political ads, and audiovisually intensified segments of post-classical cinema. Music video is dependent on ephemeralities of color, movement, and sound. Like popular music, music video possesses motifs, rhythms, grain, and fine details that carry weight. Music videos as a form often have odd peculiar entailments: background figures, for example, partly because they are mute tend to adopt strange roles. Music video directors like to say that there is no one right setting for a song–there are many possibilities.