Music Video Mondays - Intro

Once a week, I'm going to look at popular music videos and how musicians work with the cyborg.  It's not really surprising that cyborgs have been popping up all over the place in music videos, especially with female musicians such as Lady Gaga, Janelle Monae, Nicki Minaj, et al.  As drum machines and synthesizers continue to replace live band members, technology such as autotune and even amplification enhances the voice, and female pop musicians are sexualized and constructed by their audiences/producers, the life of a pop musician is already pretty cyborgian.  Presenting the body as a mechanical construction can be a pretty empowering thing, because, to me, the cyborg is rendered and constructed, true, but it is also powerful, enhanced, potentially glamorous, and incredibly versatile.  At the same time, revealing oneself as a cyborg can be the new peep show, creating a sort of dialectic between the erotic and the freakish, made-man and struggling for autonomy.

Bionic, or erotic?

Basically, I think that that it's actually pretty difficult to use the cyborg in a music video and not introduce complicated questions about ownership, individuality, the erotic body, desire, and the nature of plasticity of the body.  I believe that surveying music videos will be a good exercise in looking for the diverse ways that pop musicians use the concept of the mechanical body, and can give insight into the ways that these representations can be subversive... or not.