The Palimpsestic Pop Music Video

Abstract

Current debates concerning popular music videos frequently center on notions of hybridity exploring how post-cinematic visual aesthetics develop from and enhance a pre-existing music soundtrack. With this chapter I propose the application of intermedia theory for the analysis of popular music videos because it centers on the conceptual, practical, and modal interrelations between and across different media. Lars Ellestrom (2010) notes that: “intermediality has tended to be discussed without clarification of what a medium actually is.”1 This lack of clarification is what I shall address in this chapter, with the aim of interrogating notions of what a popular music video might be, as well as how it is informed by, or intersects with, other media. I will discuss the remediation of older media within video in an act of “multiplying mediation” known as “hypermediacy,” specifically the creation of composite images using visual overlay or parallel diegeses, such that discrete moments in time, alternative narrative spaces, and different technologies are represented and referenced through a process of palimpsest.2. Palimpsest depends upon composite images, superimpositions, and the “interaction of different temporal traces” so that the present is seen to be “haunted by a past” that is either made visible, or brought into view through montage.3 Examining the ontology of the palimpsestic pop music video through examples by The White Stripes, Bjork, and The Lotus Eaters, I will attempt to show how a variety of contexts of representation—film, DVD, internet, and installation—produce new meanings through assimilation and extension from one medium to another. These examples affirm the relevance of intermediality for examining new meanings afforded by popular music videos. Central to the chapter is my examination of medienerkenntnis, or media recognition that calls the spectator’s attention to medial border-crossings and hybridization.4 Indeed, intermediality depends to a great extent on the recognition of “media borders and medial specificities” within specific instances of “intermedial practices within the arts,” for without such recognition the term would lose its potency and relevance.5