Visual content is integral to the creation, consumption, mediation and promotion of popular music. The ability to analyse and interpret the visual elements of popular music, therefore, is crucial for those involved in popular music scholarship, practice and promotion.
Popular Music Visuals: Analytical Approaches offers readers a comprehensive analytical toolkit, focusing on concrete examples and synthesising a range of theories and approaches from scholarly fields including popular music studies, music industry studies, semiotics, fashion studies, visual studies, performance studies and audiovisual studies. Starting from the idea that visual aspects of popular music are integral to its meaning, it considers the concept of musician persona and how this is expressed, constructed and understood through visual aspects of promotional material and performance, and offers a detailed set of approaches to analysing dress and costume, promotional images, performance visuals and music video.
Considering music-related visuals through the conceptual lenses of genre, identity and authenticity, the book takes account of the contextualising factors of time and place. As well as providing readers with a comprehensive theoretical understanding and set of approaches with which to analyse popular music visuals, it provides a critical tool to enable those in the business of creating and using visuals to identify and potentially challenge dominant visual discourses in popular music.