I’ve done a few
music reviews now, and I frequently refer to the music video presentations in
addition to just the music. Indeed, in
my review of Delta Rae’s album, I pointed out the serious distinctions between
the two experiences. A friend asked me
why I included the video element in a music review. His question got me to thinking and what
follows is the result.
The short answer
is that, because I’m a professor, I have a keen interest in how people
learn. Learning can be defined as taking
in and processing information, making patterns with data already present, and
trying to find meaning or patterns as you extrapolate toward the future. All of that starts with taking in the basic
information about the world around us.
That can’t always be done with simple text because the regular version
of literacy, the ability to read words on a page, is historically
unimportant. Up to 1950, in our own
United States, as much as half the adult population was functionally illiterate. This means that a great deal of information
was transferred visually and orally.
Historically speaking, these have always been and continue to be the
main routes of data transfer.
St. John of
Damascus (c. 650 – 750 CE) lived in a time when officials, sacred and secular,
were destroying religious images. He
vigorously objected by pointing out that the majority of the world was
illiterate, up to 95% by some estimates, and that the pictorial representations
were the best way to get across to Christian worshippers the stories of the Bible
and various saints’ lives. His position
won out and is still the mainstream understanding in Orthodox and Catholic
Christianity to this day. During the
Protestant Reformation and later, leaders ranging from Martin Luther (1483 –
1546 CE) to Oliver Cromwell (1599 – 1658 CE) insisted on destroying these
images not because they were idols but because they told a different story than
the one they wanted their followers to see.
Effectively, they accepted that John was right and feared the consequences.
One might well
ask how this relates to music. Well,
music is a means of oral story-telling.
In this medium, the normal techniques of rhetoric and intonation are
combined with pitch, rhythm, and other musical nuances. St. Augustine (354 – 430 CE) held that, again
because of general illiteracy in his congregation, the spoken word was itself a
textual form that must be preserved intact if accurate information was to be
given out and heresy nipped in the bud.
Again, he feared the consequences of the spoken word because it was so
powerful in terms of information transfer.
Music is just that much stronger because of its underlying emotional
nature.
In a more modern
vein, a man named Leopold von Ranke (1795 – 1886) held that history could not
exist without reference to primary documents.
For him, a document was any source of information, however conveyed,
that came from the original participants or witnesses. He accepted John’s and Augustine’s positions. Visual images and oral traditions counted in
his eyes. We now consider even fiction
from a given time and place to be a primary source due to its ability to tell
us about the hopes, fears, and general society of the author. Ranke is the father of history in its modern
sense and is himself the source of both narrative history and
historiography. Because of him, historians
like me remembered that our primary duty was to tell stories using whatever
means we have handy. Sometimes we do
that with dry words in long books.
Sometimes we make maps and charts.
Sometimes we reconstruct whole symphonies. And sometimes we get up in front of students
and lecture, sharing what information we can as best we’re able.
The point is
that any and every way information can be transferred from one person to
another is a valid route and a potential source or record for later
investigation. More broadly, music
videos can be analyzed in the same way an art or literature critic would look
at their respective professions. They
can include visual puns or references to prior work, sometimes juxtaposing
opposite ideas in ways mere words can’t get across. They can demonstrate social relations between
races, sexes, and economic groups. They
can be psychodramas or tales of spiritual redemption. Even when the video and the lyrics have nothing
objectively in common, they can be read individually as complete stories and
then interlaced as a metatext to provide a deeper reading and understanding of
the creators’ intent. They can be
anything the human mind is capable of creating.
So I would ask
you, gentle reader, to take on a small assignment: Watch music videos, paying
equal attention to both images and the songs, and “read” them as if they were
your favorite stories. What do they say
to you? Do they show men and women as
equals? Are the characters the sort of
people you’d want your son or daughter to spend time with? Are you disgusted or inspired? What is the STORY that’s being told? Please, share your thoughts.
At any rate, that,
gentle reader, is why I include comments on music videos in my reviews.
– J. Holder
Bennett, KMA Music Historian
