Music videos play a critical role in our age of ubiquitous streaming digital media. They project the personas and visions of musical artists; they stand at the cutting edge of developments in popular culture; and they fuse and revise multiple frames of reference, from dance to high fashion to cult movies and television shows to Internet memes. Above all, music videos are laboratories for experimenting with new forms of audiovisual expression.
The Rhythm Image explores all these dimensions. The book analyzes, in depth, recent music videos for artists ranging from pop superstar The Weeknd to independent women artists like FKA twigs and Dawn Richard. The music videos discussed in this book all treat the traditional themes of popular music: sex and romance, money and fame, and the lived experiences of race and gender. But they twist these themes in strange and unexpected ways, in order to reflect our entanglement with a digital world of social media, data gathering, and 24/7 demands upon our attention.
In recent years, the once denigrated and impure object of the music video has received more serious attention and nowhere more so than in Steven Shaviro's ground-breaking work, The Rhythm Image. Combining close engagement with the audiovisual expressive properties of specific digital music videos with broader sociological and philosophical concerns, this book argues for the emergence of a new diagram of audiovisual expression based neither in movement nor pure temporality but in rhythm. While, on the one hand this book engages with Deleuze's cinema books and through them a range of philosophical references from Kant to Whitehead, read in conjunction with contemporary accounts of post-cinema and digital media, at its core is an intense engagement with the contemporary music videos for artists including Massive Attack, FKA Twigs, Tierra Whack and Tkay Maidza that it engages with in loving detail. Ultimately it suggests that these music videos allow for the grasping of contemporary social transformations affecting race, gender, sexuality and mediated desires intensively via moments of audiovisual bliss.
