From the book “Music video and the Politics of Representation – By Diane Raiton and Paul Watson

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The music industry is controlled by so many genres (which further can be divided into subgenres)

Some artists claim to have an individual styles that avoids the classification of music genres.

However, Joshua Gunn suggests that genre is inevitable in any discussion of popular music.

This is because fans and artists negotiate the boundaries of subcultural identity.

Music genre is not only understood by as corporate texts but also as a set of codes and conventions that governs the actions and behaviours of people within the music community.

The term ‘boundary disputes’ is used to view genre, this merely means that it is always in some sense arbitrary and open to negotiation.

There are four principle generic configurations of the music video, these four are pseudo documentary, art music video, narrative and staged performance.

Defining music genres is not so much of a straightforward task, this is because some genres in music videos overlap and something considered as one genre may also be considered within another genre.

The lack of genre based work in the music video is entirely predictable for a number of reasons;

Firstly, academic criticism of music videos has often been subsumed within accounts of MTV which stress it’s postmodern formal and aesthetic properties.

For instance, John Fiske (media theorist) argues that the rock video or MTV is only TV’s original art form.

In simpler terms, he suggests that now the music video becomes conflated and confused with it’s context of it’s distribution.

Carol Vernallis argues that:

Music video derives from the song they set –the song is produced before the video is conceived – and the director normally designs images with the song as a guide. Moreover, the video must sell the song; it is therefore responsible to the song in the eyes of the artist and the record company.

The videos which accompany the songs compromising any one musical genre can display striking formal and aesthetic variation. By the same token, videos for songs from quite different music genres often have far more common factors with each other than those within the same music genre.

Imani Perry’s essay on the image and identity of women in hip hop is a good example of the kind of work which slips from discussion of musical genres to genres of video as if the two sets of text entertain specific and identifiable relationships with each other causes by the same generic genre.

This genre of music video deploys the aesthetics of documentary realism to portray the ‘working life’ of the band/artist.

This therefore functions the legitimate them as artists/role models. Whilst videos in this category associate with forms of documentary

film they use aspects such as a grainy colour scheme which is usually black and white, and a shaky hand held camera to create the documentary effect.

This is done by filming the artist in their ‘natural environment’. A prime example of this is Toby Keith’s “Get Drunk And Be

Somebody” (2006) which shows his band performing to the song live on stage in an auditorium in front of a large crowd.

Techniques of Toby’s music video include; establishing shot of the crowd to show the significance of the performance, the members dancing and singing, long shots of the venue including a rear shot, all these aspects help to maintain the conventions of this particular style of a music video.

Art video claims the legitimacy by appealing the notions of art and aesthetics.

The art music video stands in relationship to video art just as the pseudo-documentary video stands for it’s documentary style.

Therefore the director adopts artistic techniques to produce an artistic effect.

The art music video may also be a work of art but it nevertheless remains the case that it is first and foremost a promotional video.

Despite it’s content, visual art music videos tend to be about the experience of light, colour, movement and sound, in order to be aesthetically pleasing for it’s consumers.

As the name suggests, the narrative video is defined by the fact that it tells a story.

It can do this in a number of ways such as funtioningindependently but at the same time variously illustrate the complexity of the lyrical content.

A useful example of this is Tupac’s “Brenda’s Got A Baby” – 1991, the lyrics of which tell the story of a 12 year old girl’s pregnancy, abandonment of her baby whilst sliding into drug taking and prostitution.

The video which accompanies the song is almost completely motivated by the desire to illustrate the visual imagery by the lyrics which is a linear fashion as it has a beginning, middle and an end.

In modern day music videos this is not always the case because disjuncture and amplification can occur.

Unlike the other genre of music videos which tend to be for commercial purposes, stage performance embraces is promotional function and turns it into a virtue.

So these videos do not offer an image of apparently unfettered reality, neither do they claim aesthetic legitimacy (art music videos).

One of the most obvious ways in which a staged performance music video signals it’s artificiality is by locating the action in the studio, and more specifically against either a plain background or a highly stylised architectural backdrop.

An example of this would be Destiny Childs’ “Bootylicious” (2001) and Justin Timberlakes “Rock Your Body” (2003).

The four genres outlined above describe the formal and aesthetic features of a contemporary music video.

However, this is neither to say that they adequately describe every music video this is because the styling of the music videos are constantly changing and new ideas are evolving.

Many music videos can be considered as ‘generic hybrids’, which means incorporating two or more categories in a less self conscious way. An example of this is Prodigy’s Smack My B**** Up” which uses restricted narration and a subjective camera.