relations between music and motion, where the gestural level, in part, orga-
nized around attitudes, forms a bridge between these two spheres.
The British musicologist, Nicholas Cook, when discussing the relation be-
tween image and music, argues that“the coupling of image and sound contex-
tualizes, clarifies, and in a sense analyses the music.”Vernallis brings the clar-
ifying and analytical powers of images more directly to bear on music videos
when she notes that
Meyers...uses particular techniques to draw attention to the heterogeneity of a pop
song’s rhythm arrangement. Thefirst half of a musical phrase might be ornate, and
the second half given over to a smootherflow of images: a bevy of kids on big-
wheeled bikes, or a slow-mo shot of water pouring from a pail. These two contrasting
types of visual articulation–busy or drawn out–offer different vantage points. We
mightfirst listen more intently to a particular detail, and next we might hear the mu-
sic as a wash.... Meyers’s broadly drawn and well-projected visual material can
change the way we hear songs. The songs seem louder somehow. They gain a sense
of clarity and immediacy.Thus, a crucial way the video might“analyze”the music is by its approach to
editing and the sense of temporal flow in the imagery. As an overall approach,
the music video can show attentiveness toward particular details, or it can pre-
sent a more general“wash.”Cunningham does not hold back on being particu-
lar. He intervenes on a musical level, as if providing new instruments to the
musical mix. But key to his visual analysis of the music, as it is in many music
videos, is the bodily gestures displayed. Maróthy talked about how music has
the power to switch“the individual into the circuit of universality.”We may
well conceive of the gestural as a key link whereby that can take place.
Such a switching of the individual into the circuit of universality, however,
may take place in radically different ways, relating also to fundamentally differ-
ent forms of life. This is evident when moving to the last example to be dis-
cussed here, Cunningham’s independent video projectRubber Johnny. This
moves us away from the post-industrial aesthetics of Portishead so well con-
veyed in the music videoOnly You, to the freakish retrograde, yet futuristic
post-human frenzy of a mutilated and morphing character, shape-shifting to
the frenzied beat of Aphex Twin, moving faster than any human can. Still, on a
fundamental level, Cunningham’s video may be regarded as amusic video,in
the sense of a video attuned to music, where we in fact cansee(as in the original
sense of the wordvideo)music.
Mutable Temporality In and Beyond the Music Video 173