Goodwin (1992)
Aufderheide (1986)
Describes the connection of viewer to video."With nary a reference to cash or commodities, music videos cross the consumer's gaze as a series of mood states. They trigger nostalgia, regret, anxiety, confusion, dread, envy, admiration, pity, titillation - attitudes at one remove from the primal expression such as passion, ecstasy and rage. The moods often express a lack, an incompletion, an instability, a searching for location. In music videos, those feelings are carried on flights of whimsy, extended journeys into the arbitrary."
Abt (1987)
"Directors of videos strive to make their products as exciting as the music. In the struggle to establish and maintain a following, artists utilise any number of techniques in order to appear exotic, powerful, tough, sexy, cool, unique."
"They must ain and hold the viewer's attention amidst other videos; help establish, visualise or maintain the artist's image; sell that image and the products associated with it; and perhaps, carry one or several direct or indirect messages..."
Firth (1988)
Music videos may be further characterised by three broad typologies: performance, narrative and conceptual.
These types describe the form and content selected by the director or artist to attract viewers and to convey a direct or indirect message.
"Performance videos, the most common type, feature the star or group singing in concert to wildly enthusiastic fans."
Gow (1992)
The goal is to convey a sense of inconcert experience.
"The predominance of performance as a formal system in the popular clips indicates that music video defines itself chiefly by communicating images of artists singing and playing songs".
Performance videos, especially those that display the star or group in the studio, remind the viewer that the soundtrack is still important.
"Performance oriented visuals cue viewers that, indeed, the recording of the music is the most significant element".
Schwichtenberg (1992)
A narrative video presents a sequence of events. A video may tell any kind of story in linear, cause-effect sequencing. Love stories, however, are the most common narrative mode in music video. The narrative pattern is one of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back. Action in the story is dominated by males who do things and females who passively react or wait for something to happen.
Lorch (1988)
The conceptual video can be metaphysical poetry articulated through visual and verbal elements. "These videos make significant use of the visual element, presenting to the eye as well as the ear, and in doing so, conveying truths inexpressible discursively"
Turner (1986)
As a blend of video technique and imagery from film and television, music video offers us a new perceptual agenda by providing allusions to and incorporations of old iconic imagery from film, allowing us to reconstitute the pieces of the 20th century information explosion.
Bruce Gronbeck (1983)
These characteristics suggest that the most methodologically appropriate approach to understanding how music videos might function as rhetoric is to view them as cultural acts, intertextually located in the viewer's own experience. We define culture, with a little help from Bruce Gronbeck, as a complex of collectively determined sets of rules, values, ideologies, and habits that constrain rhetors and their acts. This complex leads a society to generate meaning through various message forms to establish a series of societal truths. The extent to which any form of communication such as a music video plays a part in the process of truth-making is what the rhetorical critic attempts to discover through criticism.
