David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video : 1984-2016

A follow-up to David Bowie and the Art of Music Video, David Bowie and the Transformation of Music Video focuses on the ways in which Bowie expanded music video’s form and function within the context of media convergence, transmedia and remediation.

By 1984, Bowie was riding the wave of MTV. Staying just ahead of the cusp of the wave, he could see MTV’s demise on the horizon. The possibilities for transmedia artists were changing due to converging media, participatory culture and the increasingly creative participatory role of fans. A vanguard of transmedia artistry, Bowie acted in films and collaborated with directors who were also transmedia artists, strategies that helped him to spread his ‘brand’ even further across media.

Examining Bowie’s expansion of music video across artforms, platforms and mediums, this book shows how his music videos blurred genre boundaries and generated new ways of engaging with identity, philosophy, illness, death, art, mythology and archetype. Drawing upon the concepts of media convergence, transmedia, intertextuality, hauntology, lateness, dispersed authorship and participatory cultures, this book offers primary and secondary interviews with music video directors as well as close analyses of several music videos and illuminates convergences across film, television, dance, theatre, literature and philosophy.