Dear Colleagues,
I'd like to do some shameless self-promotion. My book with Columbia
University Press, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context,
has come out. I thought some of you might be interested in the book. I've
included the jacket text so that you might see what it's about.
Best Wishes,
Carol Vernallis
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Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context
Music videos have ranged from simple tableaux of a band playing its
instruments to multimillion dollar, high-concept extravaganzas. Born of a
sudden expansion in new broadcast channels, music videos continue to exert
an enormous influence on popular music. They help to create an artist's
identity, to affect a song's mood, to determine chart success: the music
video has changed our idea of the popular song.
Here at last is a study that treats music video as a distinct multimedia
artistic genre, different from film, television, and indeed from the songs
they illuminate ¯ and sell. Carol Vernallis describes how verbal, musical
and visual codes combine in music video to create defining representations
of race, class, gender, sexuality and performance. The book explores the
complex interactions of narrative, settings, props, costumes, lyrics and
much more. Three chapters contain close analyses of important videos:
Madonna's "Cherish," Prince's "Gett Off," and Peter Gabriel's "Mercy St."
Carol Vernallis is an associate professor in the Communication Studies
Department at Wayne State University.
"This book is the first to take music video seriously as a multimedia genre
in its own right. Carol Vernallis not only has an intimate knowledge of the
repertory, but also brings together perspectives that have in the past been
pursued in isolation: the musical, cinematic, technical and cultural. With
its combination of theoretical topics and case studies, this book is the
definitive one-stop solution for anybody who wants not just to experience,
but to really understand, music videos." Nicholas Cook, author of Analysing
Musical Multimedia
"A thorough, stimulating account of the art of music video. Vernallis
provides imaginative analyses that are sensitive to the expressive dimension
of image/sound combinations. She shows how the power of music videos depends
largely on the elusive associations conjured up by fleeting images and swift
turns of sound." David Bordwell, author of The Classical Hollywood Cinema
"Experiencing Music Video is the first book I'd ever read that really does
take music video seriously. Carol Vernallis is an obsessive, passionate and
continuously surprising video viewer, and succeeds in creating a quite new
analytic field." Simon Frith, author of Performing Rites: on the Value of
Popular Music
"Carol Vernallis has done what no one else has to date... she has seen
beyond the surface of the music video and has found the true and unique
language of the art form." Francis Lawrence, Film/Music Video Director
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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.ScreenSite.org
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