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Beschreibung:
Often cast aside as a mere advertisement, a vapid illustration of sound, music video has received little scholarly attention to date. However, especially in the 1980s, the art form enamored entire generations of adolescents, who turned to it because it promised an escape into a less restrictive, more enticing life. This article reads the music video of Laura Branigan’s 1984 pop song “Self Control” in the context of the simultaneous rise of social conservatism and the emerging medium of the music video. I argue that “Self Control” entraps its audience in the artificial, unattainable space music videos create in order to profit off the wish to transgress one’s material surroundings. For this venture, the video appropriates queer, transgressive spaces, aesthetics, and conventions, which were fashioned in the late-1970s disco era. It then subjects disco spaces to two parallel processes. One is that of reworking and refashioning them to appease a mass audience and its tastemakers. The other is that of abstracting these spaces and severing their connection to the lived realities in which they originate. Together, these processes refashion the format of the music video into an industrial product that mediates pleasurable experiences such as free bodily expression and the temporary suspension of marginalization. I trace these developments by analyzing several parameters of film style, including mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing.