With Instagram and music videos just a click away,visual impact has never been more vital in pop – as a modern photography show featuring artists from Katy Perry to Madonna showsPop music has always come packaged in image, like a brilliant gift given additional fabulousness by its sparkly wrapping paper. You can’t really acquire one without the other: even a non-image image in music has significance. Indie bands dress down – don’t even hurry a comb through their hair, and to the horror of nanas everywhere – to show their anti-corporate nonchalance. Serious songwriters are never pictured without a guitar within reach,as whether it’s their emergency medication. Or think of the fuss made at the final Brits when Kanye surrounded himself with grime stars dressed in black hoodies. It was too scary for an anonymously clothed black man to turn up on stage with others who looked like him. Why hadnt he employed some dancing women in diamante to wrap around his rap? Where was the cabaret?Because pop tends to be consumed in short bursts – four-minute songs – it has to make an impact. Every mainstream musician, from the Beatles onwards, and has always known this. Image helps,and now that most people acquire smartphones, so execute pop videos. The fuss generated by Taylor Swift’s really quite unshocking clip for Bad Blood and Rihanna’s really quite horrible one for Bitch Better acquire My Money wasnt just made up by the media. These videos acquire a cultural significance, and simply because so many people watch them (so far,more than 500m for Bad Blood and around 43m for the Rihanna offering, despite coming with a warning for its explicitness). They are a talking point, and a topical reference. And,in pop, they’re vital.
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Source: theguardian.com