Abstract
Music video is an underappreciated type of audiovisual artefact in studies of the aesthetics of world politics, which typically privilege linear narrative storytelling and struggle to communicate how sonic and embodied practices also constitute world politics as sensory experiences through which individuals make sense of the world. Yet the ways in which music video invites spectators’ senses to work together, and to filter meaning through their knowledge of stars’ own ‘meta-narratives’, expose an intimate and affective continuum between the politics of stardom and attachments to collective projects such as militarism. This paper explores that continuum through a study of Rihanna’s video ‘Hard’ and the aesthetic strategies it used to visualise her performance of a ‘female military masculinity’ in a fantasised space employing signifiers of US desert war.
 
Highlights
Music video is an underappreciated type of audiovisual artefact in studies of the aesthetics of world politics, which typically privilege linear narrative storytelling and struggle to communicate how sonic and embodied practices constitute world politics as sensory experiences through which individuals make sense of the world
The sonic dimension of musical meaning in world politics is essential and even this paper argues, insufficient for understanding the aesthetics of contemporary popular music, which make songs not just auditory artefacts but audiovisual ones
Exploring how viewers might have made sense of the “military chic” (Tynan 2013) of ‘Hard’ illustrates much about the aesthetics of music video as a genre: its use of embodied performance to produce meaning in synchronisation with sound, language and moving images, and its reliance as an element of meaning on stars’ biographies, or what the music video scholar Andrew Goodwin (1992, 98) termed stars’ “metanarratives”. These assemblages of musical and visual representations show that the mediated sensory experiences of encountering world politics in the everyday are multisensory: the meanings of audiovisual artefacts cannot be read from sound, language, still image or moving video, but exist in the synchronicities and dissonances between them, mediated by what audiences know about the bodies they contain
Summary
Since 2009, ‘Hard’ has become not just a (complex) story about gendered, racialised and sexualised “figurations” (Leigh and Weber 2019) of security, geopolitics, violence and militarisation, and a historical text, one that was imagining the projection of US power under Obama rather than under Trump. Perry as a star embodies white femininity, and her videos characteristically create “fantastic visions of whiteness”, including fantasies of temporarily becoming the exotic Other that she can divest (Clark 2014, 322); Rihanna enters the field of celebrity as an exotic Other, putting her in a similar relationship towards her white contemporaries to the one Grace Jones occupied in relation to Madonna (Jelača 2017, 454) Though this contrast between two celebrities does not go as far as Marsha Henry argues is necessary in connecting studies of militarised masculinities to “a focus on poor black women” (Henry 2017, 183, my emphasis), it shows that the fusion of race and gender are necessary for making feminist sense of embodied performance, popular culture and militarisation. The realisation that ‘Hard’ and other videos of its era are historic texts hints that historicity itself is an underappreciated element of meaning-making in audiovisual aesthetics – yet a deeply political one that deserves to be further theorised and researched, showing how spectators are positioned not just in space and in time
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