The genre and multimodal configurations of music video

Abstract

Despite their increasing popularity and social circulation in mass media (television, internet and various mobile electronic devices such as tablets and cell phones), the genre music video has not received a suitable attention by the discursive and linguistic research. Guided by the intend of remedying this omission and seeking to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to this object, this work makes use of the assumptions from social rhetoric and studies of multimodality for the purpose of establishing a categorization of the genre configurations of music videos. To do so, it uses as a criterion the salience of the attributes that stand out in their compositional organization, style, thematic content and their dynamics. Thus, this research seeks to employ a single parameter, consistent and sufficiently wide, improving the current classifications, quite inconsistent and / or too far-fetched. Another distinguishing feature of this typological proposal is to associate to each configuration a potential self-image built by a singer in the music video – something that, until now, had not been considered systematically by other researchers. For the analytical corpus, we selected the following music videos by American singer Madonna: Material Girl (1985), Vogue - MTV's 1990 Video Music Awards (1990), Bedtime Story (1995) and Hollywood (2003). As a result of analysis, it is possible to propose the following basic genre configurations for the study of clips: a) music videos with salience in performativity; b) music videos with salience in fictionality; and c) music videos with salience in artistry.