
Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones
Roger Beebe
The essays take on a range of topics, including questions of authenticity, the tension between high-art influences and mass-cultural appeal, the prehistory of music video, and the production and dissemination of music videos outside the United States. Among the thirteen essays are a consideration of how the rapper Jay-Z uses music video as the primary site for performing, solidifying, and discarding his various personas; an examination of the recent emergence of indigenous music video production in Papua New Guinea; and an analysis of the cultural issues being negotiated within Finland’s developing music video industry. Contributors explore precursors to contemporary music videos, including 1950s music television programs such as American Bandstand, Elvis’s internationally broadcast 1973 Aloha from Hawaii concert, and different types of short musical films that could be viewed in “musical jukeboxes” of the 1940s and 1960s. Whether theorizing music video in connection to postmodernism or rethinking the relation between sound and the visual image, the essays in Medium Cool reveal music video as rich terrain for further scholarly investigation.
Contributors. Roger Beebe, Norma Coates, Kay Dickinson, Cynthia Fuchs, Philip Hayward, Amy Herzog, Antti-Ville Kärjä, Melissa McCartney, Jason Middleton, Lisa Parks, Kip Pegley, Maureen Turim, Carol Vernallis, Warren Zanes
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About Roger Beebe
Reviews for Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones
Matthew Campora
M/C Reviews
“The essays are intriguing and draw on a combination of music-video scholarship, television studies, popular music studies, and popular musicology. . . . This is a book for those interested in intersections between music and visual cultures and aesthetics. Highly recommended.”
M. Goldsmith
Choice
“Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton’s omnibus of thought-provoking—and in several cases canon-altering—essays are poised to correct the ‘‘myopia’’ of long-entrenched scholarship on the music video. . . . This is a refreshing and pleasurable compilation which should revitalize and reposition discussions of the music video.”
Michael T. Spencer
Popular Music and Society
“This book, well documented and carefully edited, seems to be a major contribution to the literature of popular music and its visual forms. One comes away from it with a greater appreciation for the innovativeness and the challenges involved with this art form.”
Jack Estes
Journal of American Culture