The ultimate postmodern text?

Increasingly of late some media theorists consider music video to be the ultimate postmodern texts because they abandon narrative structures and are often a non-realist construction, for example ‘Can’t stop’ by Red hot chili peppers. They also combine high art and popular culture into one piece of creative imagery that is seen and appreciated widely. And finally they borrow heavily from other cultural text which is intertextuality; this intertextuality is a vivid but wild mix of eye-catching images that blur chronological distinctions so as to make conventional notions of past/present/future less important. This is seen as a very contemporary, exciting, and ‘new’ convention within the media industry.

Music videos have been said to have made image more important than the actual musical experience which is seen as a bad thing because it can discriminate against people who have what is seen as a ‘poor image’. This viewer obsession with image rather than the music has bred what Lawrence Grossberg calls ‘inauthentic authenticity’ which is where we know as the audience that we are not actually watching the artists perform but we go along with it because we are much more concerned about the visual aspects of the video.