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Finding Love in Hopeless Places

2017; Society for Music Theory; Volume: 23; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.30535/mto.23.2.5

1067-3040

Marc Lafrance, Lori Burns,

Gender, Feminism, and Media

This paper presents an interpretive approach to music video analysis that engages with critical scholarship in the areas of popular music studies, gender studies and cultural studies. Two key examples—Pink’s pop video “Try” and Rihanna’s electropop video “We Found Love”—allow us to examine representations of complex human relationality and the paradoxical challenges of heterosexuality in late modernity. We explore Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid love” in connection with the selected videos. A model for the analysis of lyrics, music, and images according to cross-domain parameters ( thematic, spatial & temporal, relational, and gestural ) facilitates the interpretation of the expressive content we consider. Our model has the potential to be applied to musical texts from the full range of musical genres and to shed light on a variety of social and cultural contexts at both the micro and macro levels.