Contemporary video clips represent music in ways that are dominated by visual codes, but they possess important formal attributes which derive as much from popular music as from television. John Fiske's spinner in this issue argues for the originality of the video clip as a form; this originality lies in the "foregrounding of the signifier over the signified", the "open-ness of the textual structure", and the "appeal to a non-conventional, possibly oppositional audience". The first two items may be seen as almost identical formally, in that they are invoked by the video clip's preference for visual signifiers which resist rational organisation. Given this conflation of categories, however, these formal features can be seen to be as fundamental to popular music as to the video clips.
There is a genuine problem in talking about popular music without a theory of song as discourse, or a semiotics that accounts for the signifier/signified relationship in lyrics, music, and lyrics and music (the most elementary categorisation, neglecting instrumentation, "the grain of the voice" and so on). John Fiske's claim that "rock music defies signifieds" is a judgement which emphasises the lyric, the verbal, at the expense of the signifying activity of the music. Yet, if we were to reverse this emphasis and separate the verbal from the musical content, it is impossible to talk about rock music as anything but signifieds. In myth and music, Levi-Strauss paints out, the message is decided by the receiver, not the sender; making sense of music is dependent upon the signifieds. "Try," says Barthes, "to talk about music without using a single adjective." Very often the content of popular song is not easily rendered in words of any kind.
So far, we do not have a fully articulated theory of song as discourse, or as a system of signification. What we can say about popular music has to be speculative or cautionary rather than definitive. This problem does affect the discussion of video clips. Although the visuals may be the most interesting aspect of video clips, they must be seen in their relationship to the signifying function of the music which occupies the soundtrack.
One factor of originality Fiske sees in the clips, their apparently dominant concern with the signifier, pertains to the degree of rationality in the connection between signifier and signified, the lack of linearity in their ways of making sense. This attribute, which also
122 Aust .J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
contributes to the "open" structure, is a formal attribute of popular music. "Making sense" has never been high on rock n' roll's list of priorities, and nonsense songs of one kind or another, as Bob Hodge points out, have been part of popular music from the beginning. In rock n' roll they are endemic, subordinating the verbal function of the lyrics to the musical function of the voice or the rhythmic pattern of the lyric, in such songs as "My Sharona", for example. Apparently nonsensical songs do have meaning attributed to them, however, through their special relation to Fiske's third feature, the non-conventional, possibly oppositional audience. Putatively meaningless lyrics in popular song can perform a subversive, if tribal, function by invoking the possibility of the discovery or interpellation of private or illicit content. Consider songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", "I am the Walrus", "Mellow Yellow", or "White Rabbit" (all referring to drug usage within their target audience); or the earlier "Tutti Frutti" or "Be Bop a Lula" (referring to equally illicit sexual behaviour among their teenage audiences). Such songs, while meaningless to the larger culture, are given private, sexual, or loosely subcultural meanings by the rock n’ roll initiates. (The words rock n' roll themselves rapidly lost their original, subcultural meaning as they were appropriated by the dominant culture; the words', and the form's, subversive possibilities, however, still exist in a tension against the industry that tries to enlist and naturalise them.) The forms taken by rock n' roll continually explore new ways of transmitting these exclusive messages to its audience under the guise of nonsense or cipher. The heavily metaphorical lyrics of the early songs of Bob Dylan or the mid-period Beatles, the fashion for recording messages on the end of albums (sometimes backwards), and for inscribing messages into the vinyl itself, all suggest the existence of a kind of tribal code. Cracking the code confirms your membership; however, once the code is cracked the message can still be definitively cryptic. The implication is that members are free to make the message mean whatever they want.
Many rock n’ roll songs, like the videos, offer themselves as either inherently irrational or of such total conventionality as to deny the possibility of an individual textual meaning; whatever meanings are ascribed to them may be excited rather than preferred by the text — they are projections from a selected audience's response to or creation of the text. While the possibility of meaning is thus "held open", the manner in which the clips and the music select their audience is not. In both forms the signifiers are aggressive, intimidating, assertive, loud (visually as well as aurally) and the bank of images used are organised around a myth of opposition between the target audience and the mainstream culture (which appears in various guises, but usually as rich people or parents). The current video style is a product of the multiplicity of signifiers, visual richness implying a proliferation of possibility.
123 Aust .J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
There is a sense in which this implication is illusory. Nevertheless, if there is a view that the originality of video clips inheres in the fact that the clips are ontologically open, there must be some recognition that this is also true of the music itself. In rock n’ roll there is a tradition of an openness of form, an accommodation of possibility. This can be seen in the commitment to an ideology of independence and individualism, in the appropriation of "solo" contributions from jazz (a mode that is, significantly, almost without representation in current popular music) and in the musical patterns preferred. For example, the dominance of the 4/4 rhythm in rock n' roll derives from its origins in blues and country music. It is a particularly progressive rhythm in that it proceeds with no sense of the pattern having commenced its sequence at any series of points during the song. If we compare rock n' roll dancers, for example, with dancers beginning a waltz in 3/4, we see the waltzers wait for the "opening" to come around and then begin the tightly structured sequence of the dance. The rock n' roller walks onto the floor and begins almost immediately, the 4/4 rhythm allowing an immediate entry into its porous structure. Further, the tradition for rock n' roll dancing has been for dances to consist of a repertoire of possible movements, that are not ordered in any particular sequence. Again, it is a kind of kit the dancers assemble in their own way and at that moment. This parallels the way in which the viewer assembles and reads the video clip. While it is tempting to see the characteristics of the video clip excited solely by the imposition of visual codes, then, we need also to be aware that the meanings we detect and the ways of constructing the meanings we detect in the visual text may also be available to us not only in a particular musical text but also in the codes and conventions of rock n' roll.
Where video clips share formal attributes with the music they represent they also share its political potential. It is not intrinsically radical or revolutionary. As with rock n’ roll, the major reservoir of signifiers for the clips is the view of the culture selected by fashion and disseminated through the music industry. Particular fashions may occupy a position anywhere along the political spectrum from conservative to radical, but they are always subject to the commercial pressures of the market. The Adam Ants of yesterday find themselves stranded, forced into seeking mainstream legitimation by doing anti-smoking commercials. Fashion can be play, however, if the arbitrary invention of criteria of discrimination is an imaginative exercise, and it does characteristically look for a renovating position or opposition-al stance. To see, however, what the effect of the coalition between the processes of fashion and the images exploited by the video clips has been, we can look at the impact video clips have made on the record industry. Video clips currently illustrate fashion as much as music, connecting images of appearance, roles, occupation, leisure, power, and youth with particular bands or singers; as these fashions
124 Aust .J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
seem to dominate the youth subculture now, video clips dominate the singles market in the record industry. It is impossible for a single to be a hit without a clip now. The singles market is structurally the most volatile, the most dependent on high turnover, the most profit-oriented sector of the music industry, and the sector most restricted in the range of musical/verbal forms, styles and content it contains. The album market, although steadily shrinking due to the continuing decline in the record industry, is less volatile, less dependent upon rapid turnover 'and thus fashion), and has a wider range of musical product. Video clips have not made their mark in the album sector to nearly the same extent, nor have the video- and fashion-preoccupied British pop artists displaced American album artists whose music and videos are noticeably old-fashioned in that they still foreground the music and the musician. (Even Michael Jackson's videos maintain a close connection with the details of his live performance). It is important to recognise that videos have not caused an increase in total record sales; they have simply increased the sales of those records with strong videos. The result is a reduction in the number of singles promoted and a narrowing of the range of musical styles and subcultural fashions represented through the singles charts. We are not looking at a range of new, "minority" voices finding their way into popular music through the videos; simply a different way of promoting a popular music that was losing its main source of industrial growth, a volatile singles market. A close examination of the signifiers in videos reveals not only the dominance of fashion but the narrow range of the representation of fashion (take out the versions of New Romanticism typified by Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and the obligatory street dancing, and what is left?). In the popular representation of fashion in video clips and in pop singles, the range of attitudes, positions and perspectives is very limited indeed. Video clips, as TV, offer us multiple signifiers of the same signified; as Bob Hodge notes, he sees the same capitalist myth rearticulated from one video to the next.
So, while the video's combination of signifiers and signifieds may be exciting in its arbitrariness, and in the subsequent invocation of a sense of possibility, the range of what is actually presented is heavily proscribed by the boundaries of fashion rather than opened out and radicalised.
While video clips are an interesting new form, and their relation to popular music does reveal a change in popular music's cultural function, much of their apparent uniqueness is a product of the ideology and structure of rock n’ roll. Like rock n’ roll, video clips' radical potential is bound up in the familiar and paradoxical relation between the form and the industry, establishing an independent ideological stance only to find that its marketability convinces the industry of the need to appropriate that stance as its own. Since they are part of the music industry and subject to the same pressures as
126 Aust .J. Cultural Studies, 2:1 (1984)
records, I cannot see much ground for expecting the radical potential of video clips to be any greater or less than the radical potential of rock n’ roll. The history of rock n’ roll reminds us, too, that the forms we see in video clips now are not fixed or definitive of the medium in anything other than the most narrowly synchronic sense.
Graeme Turner teaches at WAIT.
New: 21 October, 2019 | Now: 13 November, 2019