Music Video, Remediation, and Generic Recombination

Abstract

Music videos continue to be one of the most adaptable forms of media due to their unique ability to remediate everything from Western films to Zoom meetings. Their relatively low budgets and ever flexible assemblages of audiovisual components make them sites for experimentation, and they regularly recombine generic conventions from a range of media. This essay makes the case that studying music video demands a multifaceted approach to genre: if we accept that music video is a moving assemblage of genres and media, we can move toward unpacking the unique configurations of genre and medium in a given music video or subset of music videos. This method might suggest a shift in the way we think through genre in the future, moving away from single genre studies (however expansive or changeable a given genre might be) and toward studies that treat genre in a more recombinatory way.