Music Video and Transcultural Imaginaries

From their inception, music videos have served as an important instrument for depicting collective emotional states, cultural affiliations and processes of social change. At the beginning of the 21st century, the utilization of the music video genre changed, with more and more artists using it to address social and political grievances as well as questions of identity. Both the decline of music television as a gatekeeper limiting access and participation as well as the rise of social media have contributed significantly to the growth of the critical and subversive but also utopian potential of music videos. As a result, music videos today offer counter-proposals to heteronormativity, ableism, patriarchalism, racism and other forms of oppression that not only reach a wider audience but also reflect a broader diversity of lifestyles, interests and motivations than was possible during the MTV era. This volume explores transcultural imaginaries in music videos from a variety of angles, providing a broad overview of approaches to negotiating the “cultural” in the music video genre, both past and present.