Postmodernism and The Music Video

What is Postmodernism ? 

Dictionary Definition :  " A style and concept in the arts charxctised by a distrust of theories and ideologies and by the drawing of attention to conventions"

Postmodern media rejects the idea that any media product or text is of any greater value than another. All judgements of value are merely taste. Anything can be art, anything can deserve to reach an audience, and culture ‘eats itself’ as there is no longer anything new to produce or distribute. The distinction between media and reality has collapsed, and we now live in a world  defined by images and representations – a state of simulacrum. Images refer to each other and represent each other as reality rather than some ‘pure’ reality that exists before the image represents it – this is the state of hyper-reality. All ideas of ‘the truth’ are just competing claims – or discourses and what we believe to be the truth at any point is merely the ‘winning ‘discourse.

To understand what post-modernism is you have to look at what came before. There is a theory that suggests that genres go in order of :

1.  Post- Modern 

2. Cannon 

3. Experimental 

If the experimental stage of genre aims to establish trends and the cannon stage works within those trends to fix them into our cultural understanding, then post-modernism looks at those trends, and adds something new in which creates a new experimental stage etc. Furthermore it has been said by some that the music video is a post-modern stage of the evolution of cinema as many artist are now starting to add a short stories/films into their music videos. So Postmodernism becomes the ‘new’ by referring to the ‘old’.

Postmodernism is also said to reflect modern society's feelings of alienation , insecurity and uncertainties concerning identity, history, progress and truth, and the break-up of those tradition like religion, the family or, perhaps to a lesser extent, class, which helped identify and shape who we are and our place in the world. Artists like Kanye West , Michael Jackson and David Bowie are all cited as examples of postmodernism in the ways in which they have created or re-created different identities for themselves.