Negative Product Media: Music-video as Immanent Critique

This paper will examine the function of the contemporary commercial music-video in a context defined by an ongoing crisis in the ‘traditional’ musical commodity as a profitable object. An outcome of the colonisation of music’s profitability by globalised (hegemonic) streaming services such as YouTube from 2005 and Spotify from 2006, the economies of pop music are quickly changing, and in light of the Covid19 pandemic, ever more so. Drawing conceptually from my own practice-led methodology, and loosely from the methods and arguments of critical theory – including the divergent traditions of the Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies – this talk will centre on the form and function of the music-video today. The paper will offer a series of propositions as to how the formal qualities of music-video might be mobilised by visual artists and musicians to “immanently critique” these changes. Focusing specifically on the internal dynamics of the form, its distinctive audio-visuality, technologies and models of subjectivity, the paper will offer a speculative analysis of how these elements in particular might be negatively approached by such a critique.