Dancing in the distraction factory

Dancing in the distraction factory offers a very valuable insight into music video and although it is aimed at degree level students, it is still a very good secondary source for my research as it investigates a scope of critical perspectives on music video with different case studies of particular artists and videos.
It offers the views of many different critics such as Mercer, who considers music video to be a kind of cinematic genre all of its own, Fry and Fry who view them purely as a new form of advertisement, Friske sees them as a new form of television as classic postmodern texts, Walker views them as essentially visual art, Lewis looks at them in terms of shopping culture and finally Marcus as a form of semiotic pornography.

However the point of looking at all the opinions of these critics is not to see their reasoning, although that is important, but within this book the point is to show that it is nearly impossible to say what music video is or to categorize it, as for every argument put forth against them it is easy to put forward a convincing counter-argument explaining why they are important and a good form of media. For example, MTV is often blamed for societies inability to see what really matters, be completely image obsessed and have a short attention span, but it has also been at the forefront of promoting new acts and enabling artists such as Michael Jackson and Prince to become world renowned. It is thought that ‘Billie Jean’ is the song that changed MTV’s focus from rock and pop and onto R’n’B enabling this artist to reach global superstardom.

Dancing in the distraction factory also discusses the idea of meta-narrative and star persona; this is an artist turning themselves or their image around through the medium of music video into a marketable product almost by inventing themselves a star persona. Meta-narrative illustrates how a collection of promo videos can be built up by an artist as a kind of story or meta-narrative to their development as an artist and a person. A good example of this is Kylie’s ‘story’ from frizzy haired innocent teen to global sex symbol.
But as stated at the beginning it has limited use due to the fact that it is pitched at degree level students and that it is focused more on the music television side of music video instead of the in-depth production side of music video. All this makes it good for a source of secondary background research but not as useful when trying to generate creative ideas for our media product.