Pop music has a weird relationship to science fiction. Pop, as a genre, sometimes touches on sci fi themes, but I would argue that it's really only recently that pop has fully embraced the stripped down industrial aesthetic of more modern science fiction, as opposed to the more over the top Space Opera aesthetic.
If you've been following this blog for a while, you can guess at just who caused the big shift.
Reading the title might also help.
For your convenience, here's the
first three articles in my Ways of Reading Gaga series. Call it the first trilogy perhaps. They're worth looking over before reading this one, if only because it's been a while since I wrote the first one. It's not really a prerequisite, though, I don't think.
While you're doing that, I'm going to go ahead and brush up on some of the precursors to the modern aesthetic that sci fi pop videos are working with. The precursors largely fall into two camps: Pop Positive Space Operas and Industrial Cynical Cyberpunk. Let's check them out:
SPACE POP OPERA POSITIVE
There are two obvious precursors to sci fi in pop. They come out of the 90s, and they're perfect example of the spirit of optimism and fun that characterizes these early modern pop forays into science fiction.
One is the video for "Larger than Life" from The Backstreet Boys:
What, no Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars? Too old or too epic? X)
ReplyDeleteDavid Bowie cannot really be incorporated into any analysis of contemporary pop because he always predates pop movements by about five years, primarily by inventing them first. (For instance, he invented glam with Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars & Aladdin Sane, and shortly after glam started being called glam, he released Diamond Dogs, which not only was proto-punk but directly inspired a large number of both the early punk and early new wave artists.) You could say that Bowie's use of science fiction imagery in videos was in part the genesis of it in the work of other artists (which may or may not be bullshit), and that in twenty years every music video will closely resemble the video for The Stars Are Out.
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