This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. We hope our tack will inspire a confederated approach, where art historians, dance scholars, media experts, and those who work on poetry and rap lyrics, costuming and architecture would write alongside us. Each of us takes on a different facet: Dani Oore writes on the song’s rhythm arrangement, Eric Lyon attends to rhythm and the song’s production features, Gabriel Ellis attends to the song’s multiply-stylized vocal performances, Maeve Sterbenz considers harmony and gesture Gabrielle Lochard looks closely at race and the background figures Dale Chapman attends to “APESH**T” in relation to other African American, opulent, art-inspired videos as well as their bonds to neoliberalism Jason King considers larger contemporary phenomena, including other films, that turn to the museum as a historical repository that might help us solve what feels like humanity under threat Kyra Gaunt describes how The Carters confront exclusionary regimes of power and other “ape-shit” through a mosaic of art, music, and media and I offer an overview of music-video aesthetics, and some possible ways of finding a path through the video. Music videos are open forms, and as each analyst charts his or her path through the video, we can get a sense of a personal perspective (and readers can then more carefully track their own trajectories as well). (This might include looking at a dance gesture against a harmonic shift and an edit, and asking how these might relate to one another.) A collective approach is probably the best way to understand a clip and the genre, and also adds some benefits. It’s not only due to, as Ann Kaplan has observed, that music videos straddle a border between advertising and art, but that the analyst must also feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. We can imagine why there’s been such a paucity of music-video scholarship. This colloquy may be the first multi-perspective, in-depth look at a music video.
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