Genre and Music Video: Configurations and Functions

Abstract

Genre, whatever else it might be, is first and foremost about categorisation, about sorting cultural products into discrete groupings based on similarities and common properties. Moreover, this act of categorisation is always purposeful. In other words, this process is done for a specific reason, whether that reason is socio-economic, cultural or academic. In the first place, from an industrial standpoint, genre performs specific economic functions in so far as it works to organise the financing, production and marketing of cultural products so as to ensure maximum return from investment. For consumers, genre is one of the principal ways of choosing which products to buy in the first place and also perhaps the key marker of taste – a means of expressing likes and dislikes and identifying and communicating with like-minded people. In academic discourse, the concept of genre is multi-functional. For not only are the socio-economic and cultural aspects of genre a focus of analysis across a number of disciplines, but the notion of genre is also mobilised as a way of rationalising the study of popular culture; defining the parameters of a form; as a model of textual explication; and as a way of theorising how those texts are understood in the process of consuming them. Indeed, it is precisely this multifunctionality that leads to the idea that genre is a kind of conceptual golden thread, seemingly capable of describing the whole process of creating, selling and consuming cultural products as well as providing a critical framework through which both this process and individual texts can be interpreted and explained.