Lisa Perrott - Böcker

Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie’s sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star’s luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music.The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie’s transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms ‘mediation’ and ‘navigation’ as they relate to Bowie and his career.Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. It was originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

Addressing the interart, intertextual, and intermedial dimensions of David Bowie’s sonic and visual legacy, this book considers more than five decades of a career invested with a star’s luminosity that shines well beyond the remit of pop music.The book approaches the idea of the star David Bowie as a medium in transit, undergoing constant movement and change. Within the context of celebrity studies, the concept of stardom provides an appropriate frame for an examination of Bowie’s transmedial activity, especially given his ongoing iconic signification within the celestial realm. While Bowie has traversed many mediums, he has also been described as a medium, which is consistent with the way he has described himself. With contributions from a wide range of disciplinary areas and countries, each chapter brings a fresh perspective on the concept of stardom and the conceptual significance of the terms ‘mediation’ and ‘navigation’ as they relate to Bowie and his career.Containing a multitude of different approaches to the stardom and mediation of David Bowie, this book will be of interest to those studying celebrity, audio and visual legacy, and the relationships between different forms of media. It was originally published as a special issue of Celebrity Studies.

Recorded music creation and consumption underwent a huge shift in the first two decades of the 20th century: from physical artifacts to digital; from fixed personal computers to mobile devices; from downloading and owning to streaming and access. This had a significant impact on the music 'assemblage’ – the audio, performances, videos, films, books, games – that make up what we think of as ‘music,’ and gave rise to new forms of musical new media. Björk's Biophilia, widely acclaimed as the first ‘app album,’ is one response to this context. Drawing on her direct experience as part of the creative team who made Biophilia musicologist Nicola Dibben investigates how popular music practices intersect with digital technologies at their moment of emergence in two domains: music software applications (‘apps’) for touchscreen technologies of tablet computer and smartphone, and in extended reality. She shows the way these new media formats maintain musical traditions as much as they innovate, explores the future of the album as a musical artifact in the digital age, and identifies emerging new music forms and engagements which may come to define our digital musical futures.

The first in-depth study of David Bowie’s music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie’s videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space.By charting Bowie’s creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

The first in-depth study of David Bowie’s music videos across a sustained period takes on interweaving storyworlds of an iconic career. Remarkable for their capacity to conjure elaborate imagery, Bowie’s videos provide fascinating exemplars of the artistry and remediation of music video. When their construction is examined across several years, they appear as time-travelling vessels, transporting kooky characters and strange story-world components across time and space.By charting Bowie’s creative and collaborative process across five distinct phases, David Bowie and the Art of Music Video shows how he played a vital role in establishing music video as an artform. Filling a gap in the existing literature, this book shines a light on the significant contributions of directors such as Mick Rock, Stanley Dorfman and David Mallet, each of whom taught Bowie much about how to use the form. By examining Bowie's collaborative process, his use of surrealist strategies and his integration of avant-garde art with popular music and media, the book provides a history of music video in relation to the broader fields of audiovisual media, visual music and art.

Recorded music creation and consumption underwent a huge shift in the first two decades of the 20th century: from physical artifacts to digital; from fixed personal computers to mobile devices; from downloading and owning to streaming and access. This had a significant impact on the music 'assemblage’ – the audio, performances, videos, films, books, games – that make up what we think of as ‘music,’ and gave rise to new forms of musical new media. Björk's Biophilia, widely acclaimed as the first ‘app album,’ is one response to this context. Drawing on her direct experience as part of the creative team who made Biophilia musicologist Nicola Dibben investigates how popular music practices intersect with digital technologies at their moment of emergence in two domains: music software applications (‘apps’) for touchscreen technologies of tablet computer and smartphone, and in extended reality. She shows the way these new media formats maintain musical traditions as much as they innovate, explores the future of the album as a musical artifact in the digital age, and identifies emerging new music forms and engagements which may come to define our digital musical futures.

Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.

Transmedia Directors focuses on artist-practitioners who work across media, platforms and disciplines, including film, television, music video, commercials and the internet. Working in the age of media convergence, today's em/impresarios project a distinctive style that points toward a new contemporary aesthetics. The media they engage with enrich their practices – through film and television (with its potential for world-building and sense of the past and future), music video (with its audiovisual aesthetics and rhythm), commercials (with their ability to project a message quickly) and the internet (with its refreshed concepts of audience and participation), to larger forms like restaurants and amusement parks (with their materiality alongside today's digital aesthetics). These directors encourage us to reassess concepts of authorship, assemblage, transmedia, audiovisual aesthetics and world-building. Providing a vital resource for scholars and practitioners, this collection weaves together insights about artist-practitioners' collaborative processes as well as strategies for composition, representation, subversion and resistance.

Popular music is rich in imaginative storytelling, from the songs of music hall, and street narratives of hip-hop to the 1970s heyday of the concept album. As an even broader audiovisual practice, including music video, sleeve art and star-texts of performers themselves, the possibilities for unique ways of telling stories multiply - capturing the public imagination more recently are examples like Beyoncé’s recent visual album Lemonade and experiments in popular music transmedia like Gorillaz.While music’s role as soundtrack for other narrative media has been extensively theorised, relatively little attention has been paid to how narrativity works within popular music itself. By building on writing around narrativity from popular music scholars, applying concepts from the storyworlds literature to music and vice versa, this book connects these two disciplines. It provides fresh takes on well-known case studies from David Bowie and The Beatles to Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of War of the Worlds, while introducing the reader to lesser known examples from global popular music culture. Providing a long overdue overview of narrativity in popular music culture, this book connects the dots between innovative and exciting examples across its history.

In Resonant Matter, Lutz Koepnick considers contemporary sound and installation art as a unique laboratory of hospitality amid inhospitable times. Inspired by Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation The Visitors (2012), the book explores resonance—the ability of objects to be affected by the vibrations of other objects—as a model of art’s fleeting promise to make us coexist with things strange and other. In a series of nuanced readings, Koepnick follows the echoes of distant, unexpected, and unheard sounds in twenty-first century art to reflect on the attachments we pursue to sustain our lives and the walls we need to tear down to secure possible futures. The book’s nine chapters approach The Visitors from ever-different conceptual angles while bringing it into dialogue with the work of other artists and musicians such as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Guillermo Galindo, Mischa Kuball, Philipp Lachenmann, Alvien Lucier, Teresa Margolles, Carsten Nicolai, Camille Norment, Susan Philipsz, David Rothenberg, Juliana Snapper, and Tanya Tagaq. With this book, Koepnick situates resonance as a vital concept of contemporary art criticism and sound studies. His analysis encourages us not only to expand our understanding of the role of sound in art, of sound art, but to attune our critical encounter with art to art’s own resonant thinking.

Nabeel Zuberi explores how popular music in the US and UK has mediated violence and racial conflict since 9/11. The text brings together studies from a range of contexts and genres: Hip-hop MCs on both sides of the Atlantic have rapped about the figures of the terrorist, refugee and immigrant, and commented on the surveillance and policing of racialized populations. Punk rock bands have lambasted anti-Muslim racism and Islamic orthodoxies. The sonic intensities of bass music have re-articulated the weaponization of music in torture and the soundscapes of military conflict. Pop stars have become sites for flame wars and memes in racialised discourse across social media. Through discussions of recording artists such as M.I.A., Das Racist, Swet Shop Boys, the Kominas, The Bug, Burial, Vatican Shadow, Fatima Al Qadiri, and Zayn Malik, this book engages with recent scholarship in media and communication studies, popular music studies, sound studies, ethnomusicology, and sociology.

Music videos play a critical role in our age of ubiquitous streaming digital media. They project the personas and visions of musical artists; they stand at the cutting edge of developments in popular culture; and they fuse and revise multiple frames of reference, from dance to high fashion to cult movies and television shows to Internet memes. Above all, music videos are laboratories for experimenting with new forms of audiovisual expression. The Rhythm Image explores all these dimensions. The book analyzes, in depth, recent music videos for artists ranging from pop superstar The Weeknd to independent women artists like FKA twigs and Dawn Richard. The music videos discussed in this book all treat the traditional themes of popular music: sex and romance, money and fame, and the lived experiences of race and gender. But they twist these themes in strange and unexpected ways, in order to reflect our entanglement with a digital world of social media, data gathering, and 24/7 demands upon our attention.

A follow-up to David Bowie and the Art of Music Video, David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video focuses on the ways in which Bowie expanded music video’s form and function within the context of media convergence, transmedia and remediation. By 1984, Bowie was riding the wave of MTV. Staying just ahead of the cusp of the wave, he could see MTV’s demise on the horizon. The possibilities for transmedia artists were changing due to converging media, participatory culture and the increasingly creative participatory role of fans. A vanguard of transmedia artistry, Bowie acted in films and collaborated with directors who were also transmedia artists, strategies that helped him to spread his ‘brand’ even further across media.Examining Bowie’s expansion of music video across artforms, platforms and mediums, this book shows how his music videos blurred genre boundaries and generated new ways of engaging with identity, philosophy, illness, death, art, mythology and archetype. Drawing upon the concepts of media convergence, transmedia, intertextuality, hauntology, lateness, dispersed authorship and participatory cultures, this book offers primary and secondary interviews with music video directors as well as close analyses of several music videos and illuminates convergences across film, television, dance, theatre, literature and philosophy.

A follow-up to David Bowie and the Art of Music Video, David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video focuses on the ways in which Bowie expanded music video’s form and function within the context of media convergence, transmedia and remediation. By 1984, Bowie was riding the wave of MTV. Staying just ahead of the cusp of the wave, he could see MTV’s demise on the horizon. The possibilities for transmedia artists were changing due to converging media, participatory culture and the increasingly creative participatory role of fans. A vanguard of transmedia artistry, Bowie acted in films and collaborated with directors who were also transmedia artists, strategies that helped him to spread his ‘brand’ even further across media.Examining Bowie’s expansion of music video across artforms, platforms and mediums, this book shows how his music videos blurred genre boundaries and generated new ways of engaging with identity, philosophy, illness, death, art, mythology and archetype. Drawing upon the concepts of media convergence, transmedia, intertextuality, hauntology, lateness, dispersed authorship and participatory cultures, this book offers primary and secondary interviews with music video directors as well as close analyses of several music videos and illuminates convergences across film, television, dance, theatre, literature and philosophy.

Found Footage Films examines the rich aesthetic history of cinematic remixes, from pioneering films by Joseph Cornell and Bruce Conner to contemporary mashups and memes.We live in the era of the remix. Visual artists rework images from popular culture, music producers sample and loop elements from classic songs, and content creators transform images from films and television shows into viral memes. We are swimming in a sea of appropriated sounds and images. But how did we get here? It is impossible to answer this question without considering the crucial role played by found footage films. This book argues that found footage films complicate widespread assumptions about originality, creativity, and authorship. It argues that the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of cinematic appropriation were provided by Marcel Duchamp and suggests that many scholars have thus far given insufficient attention to the sounds of found footage films—and their powerful role in shaping a spectator’s interpretation of the reworked material.

"It's wonderful to read a book that ranges across music, cinema, music video art, and literature with such ease… One of the beautiful things about this book is that it is really attentive to relationships, and this is particularly clear when talking about Kahlil Joseph's creative mentors and comrades, including Arthur Jafa and Terrence Malick." -Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Helen S. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry; Associate Professor of African & African American Studies, Duke University, USAKahlil Joseph has collaborated with musicians FKA twigs, Flying Lotus, Sampha and Shabazz Palaces among many others. He has directed numerous films, music videos and advertisements across Africa, America and Europe. The award-winning filmmaker's disruptive style – which frequently merges visual representations of transcontinental experiences with the countercultural energies of Afrodiasporic music – challenges the Eurocentric biases underpinning Western media. At the same time, his works generate various contradictions and tensions because they are themselves products situated within an economic framework of neoliberal capitalism, at once offering alternative ways of being while, simultaneously, participating in and thereby sustaining the social structures that they otherwise seek to subvert and dismantle.This is the first book-length study of Kahlil Joseph's work. Distinguishing the artist's personal and professional personas, it traces Joseph's career trajectory and artistic output, emphasizing how the director's construction of a multifaceted filmmaking persona operates in tandem with his artworks to challenge fixed, unidimensional or stable notions of identity.Through biographical study and deep examinations of the director's respective transmedia artworks, this book draws from various discussions shaped by Paul Gilroy's ground-breaking text The Black Atlantic (1993). By applying The Black Atlantic's disruptive audiocentric ideas to contemporary digital media forms generated by Kahlil Joseph and his peers alike, this book challenges the latent Eurocentricity on which dominant theorizations of 'modernity' – as well as the overlapping fields of Film, Media and Screen Studies – are grounded. In turn, it offers an alternative framework for negotiating the paradoxes, contradictions and transnational flows of our media-saturated present: namely, the Audiovisual Atlantic.This book has been selected as runner up for Best First Monograph 2025 by BAFTSS (British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies).

This ethnographic work about TikTok’s musicking in a glocal (Austrian) context complements and build upon ethnomusicological assumptions, theories, and methods for the study of musical practices in digital spaces.An overview of elements that make up TikTok’s interface as well as the technical-performative possibilities that it allows, this book introduces a general categorization of existing performance types and how TikTokers appropriate the platform to make their music. It illustrates how some TikTokers became aware of and began using TikTok, and it reviews some of the different strategies TikTokers apply to learn how to use the application and successfully develop their performances. Bermúdez explores how performers move from being “ordinary users” to becoming TikTokers, developing and performing an identity he calls TikTok Persona. Moreover, he discusses how some TikTok practices can and have occurred across multiple, interconnected platforms, and he examines how localities are articulated and negotiated in these contexts. Bermúdez argues for an understanding of musicking as a multimedia practice that different actors create and experience individually in everyday synchronous and asynchronous, physical and digital situations. The so-called TikTokers create a sense of identity and community through their performances. This study suggests that a digital performance can be, aside from a representation of reality, an integral part of it, serving as a fundamental space for constructing and performing identity.

Busby Berkeley’s big-production numbers are emblematic of the Hollywood dream factory.Exploring the tensions between escapism and ideological over-coding in the Warner Bros. musical, this book tracks the ways in which Berkeley created spectacles that are both critical and complacent in relation to the society that produced and received them. Berkeley carried into his images of utopia the assembly plant, the misogyny, the fascism and racism of his day, but his collaboration with the filmmakers (Enright, Bacon and LeRoy) into whose narratives his numbers were spliced likewise involved taking care to draw a line between spectacle and the everyday. The book makes the case that the Warner Bros. musical, with its attention to the specificity and containment of the aesthetic dimension, has corrective lessons to impart for the aestheticized politics not only of the 1930s, but also of the current age.

This book takes a musicological and sociological lens to the workings of this little-noticed sonic presence that shapes the media of our everyday lives, exploring how library music is created, received and used in online media, and what sets it apart from other musical practices. Library music is an ubiquitous yet often unquestioned presence in contemporary media. This pre-existing music is used in a wide variety of contexts, from television and film trailers to YouTube videos. Although library music was first targeted at professional audiovisual producers, the spread of digital technologies has widened this music industry’s client-base to include amateur videographers and online content makers. Drawing from qualitative interviews with composers and media producers, these actors’ perspectives are woven together in order to reach an in-depth insight into library music’s creation and synchronization with pictures. The book teases out the patterns and peculiarities of library music that distinguish it from other musical practices: it is cast here as usable music made for imagined images, and as a repository of shared musical imaginaries. By exploring how library music is continuously transformed in multiple and unpredictable moments of meaning-making, we also unveil its specificity not as a finished musical work, but rather as a raw material meant to be repurposed and reshaped beyond composers’ hands. Ultimately, the book reframes library music as an object worthy of attention – one that can reveal much about music for media today.