Sven Carlson

Sven Carlson - Theorist

Sven Carlsson believed that music videos in general fall into two groups:

• Performance Clips: Where the video mostly shows an artist (or artists) singing and/or dancing.

• Conceptual clips: where the video shows something else during it duration often for an artistic effect.

• Music videos are there to communicate the messages of the song through visual stimuli. This is debatable whether this actually happens.

Sven E Carlsson

He also said that ‘One of the most common methods of analysis is to break up the music video into black and white boxes. Almost everything is then perceived as opposites – trash or art, commerce or creativity, male or female naturalism or antirealism, etc.’

This means that what is being said is the common approach to music videos in the sense that binary opposites drive the narration of the video forward.

Performance

Carlsson created the theory that most performance videos makes the performer not the main protagonist anymore.

This is means that performers are restricted in the way that they can perform as they are being used to sell their voice, face, lifestyle etc. Carlsson says that this is down to the artist being a seller of their body image.

Carlsson believes the performer is often made into materialization ‘commercial exhibitionist’ and this is basically where the performer is made almost into a selling item – someone the fans aspire to be.