viz. - music video

Beyonce's ***Flawless Feminism

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 23:46:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

I’m so glad to be back on viz again after some time away, especially as having to write posts again gives me the chance to discuss Beyoncé Knowles’s newest record, Beyoncé, which was released without any press or preview in late December as a “visual album.” The album has 14 songs and 17 videos included in it. While critics had things to say about Jay-Z’s verse on “Drunk in Love” and the remixed audio from the 1986 Challenger disaster in “XO,” the most noticeable song was “***Flawless,” which features an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism. Paste Magazine’s review of the album noted the album’s feminist thematics, which others have discussed as well. Since I’d like to add to this conversation about Beyoncé’s feminism, I thought I’d take up how Beyoncé’s visuals, especially in “***Flawless,” depict those concerns.

Image Credit: Beyonce's SoundCloud

Some necessary backstory for the song, however: the major verses actually were first previewed in May 2013 in a track called “Bow Down/I Been On.” The cover depicts the singer wearing a pretty pink dress while surrounded by trophies; yet the proud young girl’s visage is contrasted by the song’s bridge:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches

The rough vocals emphasize the “H-town vicious” identity she’s claiming here as she announces her superiority; the “crown” imagery links to her husband’s own assertions of power as it also reinforces her position as Queen Bey. The heavily modulated vocal pitches her braggadocio into masculine tones, juxtaposing her aggression here with the girl power rhetoric of her earlier song catalogue. Critiquing Beyoncé’s language here, Rahiel Tesfamariam notes, “While intentionally deciding to have an all-woman band was a cutting-edge and progressive decision for Beyoncé to make, why would she undermine it by releasing a song that says she reigns supreme over other women?” How can we reconcile the female slur with the empowerment that Beyoncé purports to offer as a declared feminist?

The song’s remix into “***Flawless,” which pairs these lines with both Adichie’s discourse and video from Beyoncé’s 1993 appearance on Star Search, turns Beyoncé’s declaration of superiority into an invitation for other women to join her in accepting themselves as “flawless.” Even as the framing video points out a less successful moment (her group loses out to the generic metal band Skeleton Crew) for the star, we read it within her larger career arc as an incredibly successful performer. The Beyoncé who confronts the camera here is familiar: tiny shorts, beautiful wavy long hair, heavy jewelry. However, her plaid shirt and wide eyes are tougher and more aggressive from, say, the Beyoncé of “XO.” The camera weaves back and forth towards her as if in battle and the dancing at the video’s end where she’s surrounded by four dancers seems to remix the famous “Single Ladies” dance—the hands here more back and forth faster, the movements are jerkier.

Image Credit: Perez Hilton

The shift into the Adichie excerpt in the song’s middle creates a visual and aural correction to these earlier moments. If Beyoncé dominates the screen early on, we see punk-looking men and women moshing and Beyoncé is only occasionally visible within the crowd. Other women present the same confident direct gaze to the camera as Adichie declares, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Reading this in contrast with the earlier lyrics, it’s as if Beyoncé is responding to her critics. In other words, when Beyoncé asks women to “bow down, bitches,” she’s not demeaning other women. She’s just repping her own greatness, and in so doing, encouraging other women to see that as being possible for them, too. Likewise, when Adichie mentions that “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” the album’s other songs like “Rocket,” “Blow,” and “Drunk in Love” show Beyoncé as sexually aggressive in the marital bed, “graining on that wood.” The kind of feminism that Beyoncé constructs within “***Flawless” unapologetically claims visual, verbal, and sexual equality with men.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "Drunk in Love" video

If the early song declares her own process, the hook where she croons, “I woke up like this, I woke up like this / We flawless, ladies tell ‘em,” shifts into the inclusive “we.” All the ladies (single or not) are flawless, too. The title’s three asterisks perhaps don’t just stand in for the three-star rating Girls’ Tyme received. They also serve as an ellipsis for listeners to read into: do the asterisks acknowledge how woman’s flawlessness is always conditional, represent Beyoncé’s humility, or note her own work-in-progress as a black feminist?

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

However, as I’ve been writing this blog post today, I’ve been following some of the commentary on Richard Sherman’s boasts at the NFC title game, where an amazing play on his part prevented a San Francisco 49ers touchdown. Sherman, a cornerback for the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks, declared himself “the best corner in the game” in an interview with ESPN’s Erin Andrews, and talked some trash about the 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. Many media personalities have been hand-wringing about Sherman’s “classlessness.” An intersectional reading of “***Flawless” might also point out how the title’s asterisks note the problems of African-American success: to demand your competitors to acknowledge your greatness and to “bow down” invites heavy criticism. Perhaps Beyoncé’s visual and verbal immodesty might then be true feminism: asserting equality of excellence across race and gender.

#IWillAlwaysLoveYou: Whitney Houston and Rhetorics of Tribute

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:51:43 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

By this point most people—at least the ones reading blogs or The New York Times—have heard about Whitney Houston’s death last Saturday. As it so happened, Houston passed away the night before the Grammys, turning that celebration into a kairoitic moment of mourning. Singer LL Cool J opened the Grammys with a prayer for Whitney and Jennifer Hudson performed her most famous hit, “I Will Always Love You.” Since then, LeAnn Rimes and the television show Glee have offered performances of this song in tribute to Whitney. Likewise, her family is allowing her funeral to be streamed on the Internet. I’d like here to consider further the function of these institutionalized tributes. How can (or should) we remember the dead?

The Jennifer Hudson performance occurred after the Grammys showed video of Houston singing her hit “Saving All My Love For You” at the 1986 Grammys. Hudson sang part of the song while placed under images of the vibrant young Houston in red.

The performance’s visual rhetoric of mourning is clear: the blue light behind her encodes the seriousness of the moment; her black dress makes visual the grief she expresses through the song. The styled hairdo might almost be an allusion to Houston’s hair in the video. Hudson’s voice has some of the same gospel sound that Houston was herself trained in, but her register and tone are lower and deeper than Houston’s, both turning what in Houston’s performance was a divaesque number into something sadder. She ends her performance not in a repetition, “Darling, I will always / I will always / I will always / Love you,” but in “I will always / Love you / Whitney, we love / we love you.” The choice to sing “I Will Always Love You” is a natural one, not only because it’s Whitney Houston’s greatest hit, but also because the song is about saying goodbye to a loved one.

Originally written by Dolly Parton about her split from a partner, Houston’s performance of “I Will Always Love You” for the movie The Bodyguard changed in into a parting from the man who saved her life (as played by Kevin Costner). The music video made for the song, which featured scenes from the movie, showed a lone Houston in an empty theater, singing as she recollected her experiences with Costner. It is thus not just a song of parting in her voice, but one of departure.

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

Her performance of the song, described by Joe Levy, is “monumental, undeniable and, as many of her recordings were, a triumph of vocal ability that presents itself as human indomitability.” In fact, memorializing her through reference to her most famous and popular performance is to remember Whitney at her best.

Image Credit: The Mirror

However, Whitney Houston, like the deceased singer Michael Jackson, lived a life of controversy. As her personal struggles with drugs overtook her musical career, she took part in the reality show Being Bobby Brown. Certain phrases she said on the show—like “hell to the no,” “kiss my ass!,” and the infamous “crack is whack” from a Diane Sawyer 2002 interview—gave her a secondary notoriety. She became the subject of humor for comics, with Maya Rudolph doing imitations of her on Saturday Night Live. However, what Whitney can be remembered at this time? As Rudolph is preparing to host Saturday Night Live this weekend, a number of websites are speculating whether she’ll attempt to do her impersonation again. Many suggest it’s “too soon” to remember her such—but who has the right to memorialize her? Her family and friends, like Rev. Marvin Winans, are “seriously grieving” and “want to do this with dignity.” The Whitney they remember is as much a young girl as a famous singer. Her fans and the music world at large pay tribute to her vocal gifts. Others might treasure her almost-campy afterlife on Bravo and The Soup. Decorum suggests that the dignified or proper thing is to preserve her in an orderly—and ordered—fashion. Yet fans on Twitter connect to her death through hashtags varying from #iwillalwaysloveyou to #crackiswhack as they attempt to come to terms with her death. In such case, the public’s memory and public memorializing practices can’t be disciplined, though hopefully all such actions are done out of fondness and love.

Mechanized Spectacle: Lo-Fi Effects for Viral Content

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:14:02 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from YouTube

H/T: Hampton Finger

Lucky for you and me that before I started working on my blog post today that my friend Hampton asked me if I’d seen the new OK Go video for “This Too Shall Pass,” and thus I stumbled onto a much more interesting debate than any engaged in by any Texas Republicans running for the governorship.

The above video does a great job of catching the audience’s attention, as it features an enormous and complex Rube Goldberg machine (apparently created from a collaboration between the band and Syyn Labs) that not only moves a car and drops a piano, but also contributes to the song by playing music at one point. While the song itself is pleasant, the video’s visual interest overwhelms it, especially as the lyrics themselves aren’t terribly memorable. Considering that OK Go first achieved major success with their clever video for “Here It Goes Again,” in which they do a choreographed dance on treadmills, this video simply seems to fit into an artistic identity that the band has built for itself.

However, what is interesting to note is that, prior to releasing this video yesterday, the band had recorded a video for the song with the Notre Dame marching band that was released in early January. Why this video didn’t go viral as their new video (the latter of which already has generated 1.2 million YouTube hits, more than the previous one) is because their record label, EMI, initially refused to allow the first video to be embeddable on other websites. As noted by several websites, this created a controversy. The band responded not only by writing an open letter to their fans on their website, but also by publishing an op-ed in the New York Times authored by their lead singer Damian Kulash. His argument considers the power of music videos as artistic statements and financial cash machines, and asserts that EMI neglects both interests by prohibiting embedding.

He starts off the article by asserting his band’s interest in their videos as an extension of their art:

My band is famous for music videos. We direct them ourselves or with the help of friends, we shoot them on shoestring budgets and, like our songs, albums and concerts, we see them as creative works and not as our record company’s marketing tool.

However, what’s also interesting to note is that he represents the videos as much as branding devices as a creative product when he alludes to how his band is “famous” for the videos. OK Go has profited financially from viral Internet success, and Kulash isn’t afraid to admit it. However, his warning to EMI is particularly potent. While they make money from making people view the videos on YouTube, they miss out on the long-term benefits of viral success:

In these tight times, it’s no surprise that EMI is trying to wring revenue out of everything we make, including our videos. But it needs to recognize the basic mechanics of the Internet. Curbing the viral spread of videos isn’t benefiting the company’s bottom line, or the music it’s there to support. The sooner record companies realize this, the better — though I fear it may already be too late.

Kulash’s eloquence here is directed towards the bottom line: the band and EMI will only profit if people are interested in the band, and online videos now serve the purpose that radio once did. However, the “This Too Shall Pass” also raises questions as it builds onto the low-fi aesthetic of their famous “Here It Goes Again” video, which now has almost 50 million views on YouTube.

OK Go - Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

They’ve also played into a curiosity about their video by posting a series of making-of clips on their YouTube channel in a way that reminds me of the also-viral Old Spice commercial from the Super Bowl, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.”

A part of this commercial’s success lies in its lo-fi appeal as well as its success. The advertising company behind the commercial admitted in an interview that the commercial was made in one take with no CGI, something that seems almost as impossible as OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine. I think there’s something fascinating about the mix of viral Internet advertising and old-fashioned creative trickery that also speaks to a desire for an experience with the real (which may be a part of the appeal that The Hurt Locker has over Avatar, and why Roger Ebert is picking the former for Best Picture) in the midst of technological innovation. “Home made” art, as OK Go describe their video, just may be more appealing than anything else, especially as the emphasis is on the performance over the technology. (Maybe this is why State Farm’s logo is hidden in the video on the truck that starts the dominos: advertising is best done in a subtle and artistic fashion.)

As a teacher using technology and as a researcher interested in its implications, I wonder what such desires reveal in my students, and whether the use of high technology works best for them when it is least explicit and obvious.

A Compendium of the Visual Tropes of War

Brett Ommen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 17:03:10 +0000

The music video above is by Serj Tankian (lead singer of System of a Down) and directed by Tony Petrossian. Depending on your taste in music, you may want to watch it with the volume turned down.

The video does an excellent job compiling nearly every imaginable visual trope of the current war. The use of children in the video provides an excellent polysemous context for the war as well. In one sense, the video illustrates the ways imagery becomes incorporated in the play of children as a way to indoctrinate them into a war state. On the other hand, the video makes a compelling critique of the war as directed by immature leadership. The coda of the video refuses to allow the imagery of war to function in isolation as child’s play by bringing the children out into the street before a military funeral. The video might prove an apt resource in the classroom for the above reasons, or any that you might post in addition.