Music Video Gothic: Fragmentary Form at the Dawn of MTV

Abstract

This article argues that the modern music video at the dawn of the MTV era embraces a logic of the Gothic fragment. Mobilizing an archive of gothic archetypes of haunting and monstrosity, the music video of the early 1980s confronts anxieties about its unshaped aesthetic character and discursive placelessness and its strained connections to absent textual wholes, performance cultures, and marginalized histories. Through a close reading of four seminal music videos from this time period – The Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star (1979), David Bowie's Ashes to Ashes (1980), Blondie's Rapture (1981), and Michael Jackson's Thriller (1983) – I argue that the early music video incarnates a tradition of production, circulation, and decoding that I want to call Music Video Gothic. This tradition expresses latent concerns about the music video's aesthetic borders and intertextual relations with cultural and career narratives.