ABSTRACT
This chapter picks up the discussion of narrative, artist, and actor personas from earlier in order to see just how complex this issue gets when considering the sexualities and genders of different personas. It provides an annotated history of the ways women have been depicted in music videos. And, to restate the obvious, since many singers perform songs that they did not write the lyrics for, the author(s) of those lyrics (in this case, Bob Dylan) might have different gender identities and sexualities than the singer performing them. And yet valorizing the production prowess of these individual women risks overshadowing the musical collaborations of countless other women. Collaboration, rather than individual expression, is the new norm in popular music. The chapter provides the chance to apply most if not all of these concepts to a single video by analyzing “Silhouettes”.
