soliciting pop culture

[lotesse]

So as the Girl Without A TV in the 90s/early millennium, I kind of missed the music video scene. But! I find music videos critically fascinating, little compressed bits of multimedia discourse, and what's more I've found that they teach really well to undergraduates. I'm putting together my proposal for teaching next year. The course is on discourses of dirt: miscegenation, body policing, & fetishization.

Rec me music videos for either songs about dirt/dirtiness or videos that use dirt imagery in interesting ways? I've got Xtina's "Dirrty" for obvious reasons, & Dixie Chicks "Not Ready to Make Nice" for imagery. Any and all musical genres appreciated.

Comments

[sophia_sol]

Ooh, this sounds really interesting!

Going through my (admittedly also limited) knowledge of music videos, here's what I can offer. Hopefully some of them are what you're looking for!

- Raise Your Glass by P!nk (lyrics in the chorus: "We will never be, never be anything but loud and nitty-gritty, dirty little freaks")
- We Are Young by fun. featuring Janelle Monae (music video involves a bar fight where because of stuff being thrown around, everyone involved gets dirtier and dirtier. At one point there's a shot of Monae standing in the middle of everything in her excellent suit, entirely undirtied by everything around her)
- Na Na Na by My Chemical Romance (lyrics: "The little children raise their open filthy palms like tiny daggers up to heaven." Also some interesting stuff in the music video about clean pristine black-and-white colour schemes versus loud dirty bedraggled colourful)
- Teenagers, by My Chemical Romance (lyrics: "They're gonna clean up your looks with all the lies in the books to make a citizen out of you")
- Hot Mess by Cobra Starship (lyrics: "You're a hot mess, I'm loving it, hell yes." The music video turns it upside down interestingly at the end, wrt who exactly is the hot mess)

Are you interested in fanvids as well, or only official music videos?

[lotesse]

Thank you so much for all these! This is exactly what I was going for - proof y'all are the best. And yay Janelle Monae! I've been teaching her "Many Moons" this year - been doing scifi - and I'd love to keep that thing going.

I think I'm going to try to stick to official stuff. The course as currently conceptualized is a sort of quick and dirty intro to discourse analysis & cultural criticism, so I'm throwing some really nasty/offensive stuff at them, as well as attempts at subversions or counterdiscourses, and some theory to try and make sense of the mess. It's good to hear that someone else thinks it could fly!

[highlyeccentric]

I can really recommend the cosplay/convention fanvid to Raise your Glass, though. It's not a fanvid in the conventional sense, it's a self-vid about identity of con-goers. :D

[sophia_sol]

You're very welcome! :D I thought of one more video that would work: another My Chemical Romance (it's interesting that SO MANY of the examples I can think of are from one band! Clearly a theme they're interested in), called I'm Not Okay (I Promise). The music video pretends to be a trailer for a teen movie, and it says a bunch of things like "If you've ever felt alone/rejected/confused" and one of them is "if you've ever felt unclean."

I wish you luck in putting this class together! It's totally a class I'd have been interested in taking when I was in school.

[surexit]

I don't know at all if this will be relevant, but the UK has a genre called grime. Graftin' (by one of the genre's founders) starts with above the London roads that hold the grime, and there's definitely an awareness of and willingness to play with the meaning of the name, as well as a general awareness of the dirt of big cities.

It's late, this is not the best example and I can't think of others, but I suppose if you... wanted to go into a tangent about British hip-hop, it would be useful? :D