<<The>> media swirl politics, audiovisuality, and aesthetics

From fan-generated content on TikTok to music videos, the contemporary media landscape is becoming ever more vast, spectacular, and intense. In The Media Swirl Carol Vernallis examines short-form audiovisual media—Beyoncé’s Lemonade , brief sequences from Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby , TikTok challenges, YouTube mashups, commercials, and many other examples—to offer ways of understanding digital media. She analyzes music videos by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Janelle Monáe, Kendrick Lamar, Anderson .Paak, and others to outline how sound and image enhance each other and shape a viewer’s mood. Responding to today’s political-media landscape through discussions of Fox News and Presidential inaugurations, Vernallis shows how a media literacy that exceeds newscasts and campaign advertising is central to engaging with the democratic commons. Forays into industry studies, neuroscience, and ethics also inform her readings. By creating our own content and knowing what corporations, the wealthy, and the government do through media, Vernallis contends, we can create a more just world. Dedication Contents Acknowledgments A Note on the Cover Introduction I Post-Classical Cinema at the Limit 1 Partying in The Great Gatsby: Baz Luhrmann’s Audiovisual Sublime 2 Shattered Pleasures: Michael Bay’s Transformers: Age of Extinction II Music Video and the Art-Video Border 3 Beyoncé’s Overwhelming Opus; or, the Past and Future of Music Video 4 Avant-Gardists and the Lure of Pop Music 5 Beyoncé’s Lemonade: She Dreams in Both Worlds • Carol Vernallis, Lisa Perrott, and Holly Rogers 6 Tracing the Carters through the Galleries: “APES**T/APESHIT” and the Louvre 7 Storytelling on the Ledge: Lady Gaga and Jonas Åkerlund’s “Paparazzi” III Music Video’s Late Late Style 8 How to Analyze Music Videos: Beyoncé and Melina Matsoukas’s “Pretty Hurts” 9 Dave Meyers’s Moments of Audiovisual Bliss 10 Janelle Monáe’s “You Make Me Feel” and Anderson. Paak with Kendrick Lamar’s “Tints”: Getting Upin My [Rearview] Mirror IV Audiovisual Aesthetics Online 11 Who Needs Music Documentaries When There’s TikTok and Carpool Karaoke? 12 TikTok and Costume-Drama Mashups on YouTube V New Modes of Analysis: Industry 13 The Art of Color Grading • Carol Vernallis, Jonathan Leal, Eric Weidt, and Aubrey Woodiwiss 14 Music Video Directors, Production Houses, and the Media Swirl VI New Modes of Analysis: Neuroscience 15 Music Video’s Multisensory 16 Tracing the Asset: Humanistic and Quantitative Approaches to Cybercrime Film Trailers (Snowden and Bourne) VII New Modes of Analysis: Politics and Vernacular Culture 17 New Technologies, Social Justice, and the Future in Beyoncé’s Audiovisual Albums 18 Fox News, COVID-19, Brief Media Aesthetics, and Historical Resonances Afterword: Arguments for Engaging with Audiovisually Intensified Media Now, Including Corporate-and Government-Authored Materials Notes Bibliography Index "In The Media Swirl, longtime music video scholar Carol Vernallis focuses on brief audiovisual media-heightened film segments, music videos, trailers, commercials, TikTok, Instagram, and political advertising and newscasts-to provide a toolkit for citizens wanting to participate in our moment. The book offers techniques for reading digital media and audiovisual relations, with close readings of movies like The Great Gatsby (2013) and Transformers 4 (2014), music videos by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Janelle Monáe, and TikTok and YouTube videos. Throughout the book Vernallis argues for the importance of spectacle and its utopic possibilities, refusing to allow spectacle to be claimed by negative attachments. The Media Swirl also seeks to pause and reconsider ethical commitments, especially in light of changing technological regimes, social formations, and understandings of what it means to be human. The book then pivots to new techniques and areas for reading digital media and audiovisual relations, including politics and science. Acknowledging our media landscape's too-muchness, this book claims that through multiple approaches, we can engage with the commons"-- Provided by publisher