Divas, Monsters, Material Girls: Women in Music Videos

3 units

The stark black and white of Madonna's Vogue and the pinks and sparkles of Material Girl. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Lady Gaga's Telephone and the thinkpiece-launching intertextuality of Ariana Grande's thank u next. The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. Since MTV's advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from the iconic imagery of their videos; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of YouTube have only increased pop music's audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music videos, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, from critical close readings, micro-reception histories, mock (or real) thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.