Moderator: Chi Chi Thalken, Scratched Vinyl
Tyler Bunzey, “Styling the Self: The Music Video as a Primary Site of Hip-Hop Persona Development”
Since the rise of the popularity of the hip-hop music video in the 90s with platforms like Ralph McDaniels’ Video Music Box and Yo! MTV Raps, the music video has been central to many artists’ artistic practice. The medium itself is flexible and has expressive aims that serve multiple ends. For example, the music video can be simultaneously a marketing tool for a label’s new release and an aspiring filmmaker’s artistic medium. It can be simultaneous publicity for a new artist and a visual representation of aurality. Put simply, the music video is not singular in its expressive purpose.
This paper argues that varied music video performance strategies in hip-hop culture serve as a medium for artists to develop their respective hip-hop identities. The music video performance impacts everything from the compositional process to the development of artists’ personas. Put simply, the music video is not an extension or reflection of live performance but a key performance practice itself, one that extends the artists’ presence beyond the stage or recording booth. Music videos, I argue, are largely autonomous platforms in hip-hop culture. Rather than being contingent on an artist’s stage presence, fan base, or recorded archive, the music video is a primary site of identity development for hip-hop artists. After a brief discussion of the history of the music video in hip-hop culture, this paper will examine how the video bibliography of Busta Rhymes works to extend and develop two distinct personas in his work: the trickster and the mafioso. This persona shift highlights how persona development is an artistic practice in its own right and how the music video is a predominant platform in the production of persona.
Shana Goldin-Perschbacher and Elizabeth Lindau, “Thrift Store Queens: The Musical Fashioning of White Working-Class Femininity in 80s Film and Music Video”
John Hughes’s 1986 cult classic Pretty in Pink materialized on a tip from its 17-year-old star Molly Ringwald. The two regularly shared music, and Ringwald’s recommendation of a 1981 Psychedelic Furs song inspired the film’s title, screenplay, and heroine, Andie. Like many of Hughes’s teen drama protagonists, Andie comes from a working-class background. Out of financial necessity, she cultivates a distinctive fashion sense using handmade and hand-me-down items. Andie’s thrifted self-styling is, crucially, linked to music–she works at a record store owned by Iona (Annie Potts), who continually reinvents herself through vintage looks.
Andie’s thrift-store chic was part of a larger trend within early MTV videos, as superstars Cyndi Lauper and Madonna layered garments and accessories of different styles and eras. In “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” Lauper cavorted about the Lower East Side in a vintage pink satin dress and porkpie hat. In “Lucky Star,” Madonna writhed on the ground in an all-black assemblage of cropped mesh tops, fingerless lace gloves, and rubber bracelets. The mistaken identity drama of Madonna’s 1985 film Desperately Seeking Susan stems from a jacket exchanged for sequined boots at a used clothing store.
This collaborative presentation will explore thrifted fashion in 1980s pop music and pop-music inspired film. In these texts, white working-class women (real and fictional) use eclectic, vintage, gifted, or handmade clothing to reframe their class status as a cool, outsider persona–what Theo Cateforis (after Kathleen Hanna) calls the “Rebel Girl.” Vintage shopping and “visible mending” are seeing a resurgence among consumers and online fashion influencers, who present these practices as sustainable solutions to fast fashion and textile waste. Gen Z’s craze for thrifted fashion is prefigured in the “thrift store queen” sartorial styles of early 1980s white working-class pop singers and film characters.
Del Cowie, “The X Factor”
With iconic videos like Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” Usher’s “Yeah!” and Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” to his name, music video auteur Director X has applied his visuals to some of the biggest hit singles of the last 25 years, directing well over 100 music videos of countless hit songs. While many of the aforementioned titles in Director X’s musical oeuvre are unapologetically commercial in nature, serving the needs of the artist and the song, there is also a counternarrative present in his work. In many of his music videos, X, born Julien Lutz in Toronto, Canada has navigated the music video world to consistently communicate Black diasporic culture, specifically Black Canadian culture in his work. By tracing and situating the roots of his emergence and creative inspiration in 1990s Black Toronto – a time that according to Idil Abdillahi and Rinaldo Walcott’s BlackLife represented an unprecedented explosive presence of Black Canadians in music and other creative arts – this paper will recontextualize Director X’s use of the music video medium as asserting the presence, viability and resonance of Black Canadian culture. Through additional analysis of videos such as Sean Paul’s “Get Busy” and Rihanna’s “Work” I will explore how X extends this cultural foundation to facilitate a visual representation of Black diasporic culture.
Eric Lott, “Recording Western Recording”
In 1969, Harry Nilsson recorded the song “City Life” at United Western Recorders on Sunset Boulevard for release on his fourth album Harry, which arrived in August of that year. In a gentle falsetto and head voice that descends into the chest only on the third verse, a plinking soft-shoe arrangement behind it, the singer declares himself fed up with the city life, but his pledge to grab a plane and come back to his folks withers in the light of the city’s promised dollars and dreams. There was nothing obviously rebellious about the style of the tune, despite Nilsson’s soundtrack association with the X-rated film Midnight Cowboy, released earlier that year; in fact it carries the same unplugged innocence of his “Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me.” In 2003, celebrated mixed-media artist Mathias Poledna made a short film called Western Recording (on exhibit in 2023, where I saw it, at Vienna’s modern art museum the Mumok) that depicts the recording session that produced Nilsson’s song. In an unassuming button-down shirt and beige bell-bottom slacks, a Nilsson lookalike wearing monitor headphones does a credible version of “City Life” into a boom mic while reading from a music stand and surrounded by speaker cabinets and other studio paraphernalia. That is the work Poledna gives us, and it is a fine puzzle: a primal scene of recording for which we have no original, only a copy of the record; a loving historical gesture recreating a hallowed but unheroic late-60s L.A. session subculture that raises all kinds of questions about mechanical reproduction, in this case the mechanical reproduction of a moment of mechanical reproduction. Far from revolt or rebellion of a “Dick Hebdige” kind, the studio scene here nonetheless depends on certain uncanny reversals that unsettle history, the solidity of reference, 60s commonplaces, and the musical given, exploring the operation of artifice in a modality of artifice that appears to deny artifice. This “transvaluation of the norms of reality” in aesthetic formations is what Herbert Marcuse in The Aesthetic Dimension (1977) called “stylization,” for him a mode of transcendence that was a technology of liberation. Both Godard’s 1+1 and Warhol’s screen tests seem to lurk in Poledna’s provocation. But this is not the workaday studio boredom of the Rolling Stones in the former or the withering of the star image in the latter but an insistence on the scene of Recording, something like the infrastructure of style, the styling of style itself. T
