There are two Lizzo videos that you could choose from.
Special
About Damn Time
All Music Videos in a sense are postmodern as they are a media form that has only been in existence in postmodern times (post 2nd World War).
Music Videos are often examples of postmodern media, not only because their place as a recognised art form has come about in the postmodern era but mainly because they evidence a range of ideas about what makes a text postmodern.
Andrew Goodwin, a renowned media theorist sums up the postmodernism of music videos:
-
- Blurs high art and low art – it is media for everyone with no boundaries.
- Abandons/challenges grand narratives – incomplete narratives, no sense of resolution, rejection of the overarching ideologies of society/history – love conquers all, men are the breadwinners, god is the answer etc.
- Intertextuality – borrows from other texts; deliberately, unknowingly, alludes to, knowing nod to – all of which fits with Jameson’s ideas on ‘nothing new, a flatness’ or as he puts it ‘blank parody’.
- Loss of Historical reality – pastiche and intertextuality blur history and chronology so that conventional notions of past, present and future are lost in a melange of images, all of which appear to be contemporary.
- Audience/Text relationship – Breaking the 4th Wall and lip syncing
Intertextuality
- Pastiche – use of a previous text as the basis for the whole music video.
- Parody – making fun of a previous text.
- Homage and quotation – sampling.
- Weaponised intertextuality – deliberate Easter Eggs.
Bricolage
- Mixture of styles – cartoons, animations, dance, drama, acting, documentary, other footage.
Self-referential
- Draws attention to its own construction – breaking the 4th wall, lip syncing.
GENERAL SIGNIFICANCE relating to Music Videos and Postmodernism
- They manipulate time and space – flashbacks, incomplete narratives usually present and they often challenge the grand narratives – there is not always a happy ending, a dominant male, success after working hard for a living.
- Play with the relationship between audience and text – breaking the 4th wall and there is often a presumption they are culturally competent, deliberately playing with their expectations. Expected to understand the media language for the intertextual references.
- Play with the distinction between reality and representation.
- They blur the lines between high art and what is considered low art.
- This is a little old now but it shows a self-referentiality (this is a music video that we have constructed) but it also points the finger at a wider postmodern scope i.e. the idea that people are lost in their hypereal worlds, unaware of their real lives and surroundings.
Jameson:
- Intertextual References – referencing race, gender struggle?
- Parody/Pastiche – music video dancers
- Self reflexivity – breaking the 4th wall
Lyotard
- The destruction of the grand narrative
- As it challenges all of the below
- Challenging representation of gender
- Challenging representation of black women
- Challenging the representation of body image
- As it challenges all of the below