SOUND, IMAGE AND SOCIAL SPACE: MUSIC VIDEO AND MEDIA RECONSTRUCTION

Abstract

In watching a video, the visual plane tends to dominate our attention right away, simply by arresting our eyes, by being (on) television. Television seems to absorb the musical matrix effortlessly and irrevocably into its visual field, to confirm the now commonplace knowledge that music television has reshaped the music industry irrevocably. Yet that which video seems so easily to dominate and to transform-the 3-minute musical single-remains the video’s raison d’être, its unalterable foundation, its one unconditional ingredient. A single can exist (technically, at least) without the video, but the reverse is not the case. As if in evidence of this, music videos, almost without exception, do not make so much as a single incision in the sound or structure of the song. However bizarre or disruptive videos appear, they never challenge or emancipate themselves from their musical foundation, without which their charismatic indulgences would never reach our eyes.

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