Introduction: music video and cultural context and transmedia projects

The transformations of the contemporary audiovisual sphere (such as the increase in music consumption through social networks like YouTube or Instagram, with a more visual component) are taking place on the path of intermediality and transmediality, which complicates the description of a single materiality of cultural messages. Yet the fact that this process of acceleration on audiovisual hybridization is a new context, music video is already a model of this aesthetics since its inception in the 70s.

Music video was born as a dynamic art form in which the visual and the music are combined, reaching a unique effect that would be impossible without the interaction between them. It is a fascinating mix of iconic materials, creating unlimited possibilities for artistic expression, thanks to syncresis (^{Chion, 1993}) and the aesthetic techniques of synchrony. Its centrality as a format is a key term for understanding the image/text concept as already outlined by ^{Mitchell (1994}) in his Picture Theory.

After the global crisis of the recording industry in the 90s, due to the digitalization of the musical support, popular music has had to rethink itself in order not to perish. From an intermedial perspective, music video offers many possibilities for musical identity management, in an increasingly complex music industry. It is a fact that the new business model of the phonographic industry -the transition from physical to digital model- is changing the relationship of producers and creators with content, it’s redirecting attention to them and turning them into celebrities. Similarly, transmedia strategies dominate the production logic of audiovisual formats, with a growing channeling of consumption across platforms or platformization (^{Van Dijck et al., 2018}).

First, with YouTube and now with TikTok, music video remains necessary for the multilateral and transmedia promotion of music: through these formats, users get involved in creating content in relation with the artist’s visual universe and share it, making it viral and results exponential. This supposes a first form of expansion of music video in its transformation inside the logic of digital ecology (^{Jirsa & Korsgaard, 2019}) and its post-television era (^{Sedeño-Valdellos et al., 2016}). All these tools involve a set of business initiatives spread across all types of media or channels; they enable a comprehensive media presence and a multiplication of performances, incursions, and moments of access to the viewer’s attention.

As an unexpected result, these changes have led to a trend towards greater autonomy for the musical artist, who had always complained of a secondary role in the industry. The return to individual song distribution and individual listening has also been driven by the expansion of individual listening platforms and devices. Therefore, songs or tracks have recovered the reign of success; they act like atoms that can be exported to audio or video formats.

In other words, the consumption of music has gone from the album to the single, and has changed to mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. They have unified the ways that this song-content could be received and improved the visual component of the music, inevitably related to the song: In concerts, the user generated videos become mediations that extend the experience from the single event to the outside -family and friends-. The cellphone has also consolidated a platformization for the music industry. Deezer and Spotify soon invented their own mobile app and currently listening to music almost always means having an image or video on the screen in the meantime.

Consequently, artists tend to the creation of a public image of celebrity -with a special communicative and transmedia management- a complete cultural experience, that ^{Goodwin already defined as startext (1992}), and ^{Auslander (2019}) and ^{Arne Hansen (2019}) as “musical personae”:

“I understand the musical persona to be a specific kind of social selfpresentation, in Goffman’s sense, in which musicians engage when appearing before their audiences in any medium. The constituent parts of a musical persona can be described using Goffman’s vocabulary for the elements of self-presentation: setting, appearance, and manner. These elements appear in performances framed in three ways: as musical performances, as performances in and of a specific genre of music, and as events taking place within a particular socio-cultural context” (^{Auslander, 2019}, p. 106).

To that end, artists move from specialization in a discipline to immersion into various cultural tasks. The receptor acquires the protagonism as an active role in this production and reception, serving the logic of circulation and economy of the messages. The process of convergence of all media around a cultural objective, together with a general communicative context for artists, enables the creation of a long-term public image and allows the development of their celebrity.

Visual album allows another way of promoting record works: before they were sold through two/three singles, now an attempt is made to extend the life span of the records, generating consolidated worlds of meaning such as “storytelling or global mental representations” (^{Herman, 2009}, p. 197).

We are witnessing a growing number of visual albums in the music industry, caused by a hybrid media context where transmedia strategies are more common: they make possible to organize messages and nurture a personal or star-text narrative for musical artists.

The most important goal of this article is to explore visual albums in popular music by analyzing a few examples and to clarify its nature as a means to expand music video as a promotional tool. The difference in this context represents that the visual album is an expansion in length of the music video: before, one or two music videos are produced in a music album, now, all the songs on the album become visual productions -music videos-.

Likewise, the term expansion as featured in visual albums, means multiplication of music videos and exhaustion of all possibilities for making videos, unlike most albums in music history, which only have several videos as singles. Projects such as Dirty Computer by Janelle Monaé, El Mal Querer by Rosalía and Beyoncé’s three visual albums (Beyoncé, 2013; Lemonade, 2016 and Black is King, 2020), are cultural texts, composing storytellings and narratives through “rhetorical figures of repetition”, or visual patterns, as a new way of understanding the star-text and stardom (^{Goodwin, 1992}; ^{Harper, 2019}).

The intentional sample for the analysis is motivated by their variety as modalities and a special visibility of specialized criticism, combined with an interest for women in this shifting popular music industry and context: Rosalía’s El Mal Querer is an incomplete work, Monaé’s Dirty Computer is composed by intermissions or episodes with dialogue and, finally, Beyoncé’s Black is King has two formats: a film and a visual album itself. These three examples are described as a way of drawing a broad panorama of the visual album.

From a methodological perspective, cultural analytics and analysis of multimodal discourse have been selected as research spaces (^{Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2009}); also, we could encompass the work within the perspectives of the semiotics of culture. This focus allows us to address the common meaning of all textual materials (picture, sound and text) globally. We have resorted to the procedure of viewing and recording significant elements at different visual, sound, and narrative levels of the units of analysis: the albums by Beyoncé, Janelle Monaé, and Rosalía. The approach to visual patterns was analyzed by ^{Balló (2000}), very close to iconographic analysis, with the aim of finding characters, scenarios, objects, and gestures that repeat each other; they package music videos in visual albums.

The Visual Album

Studies in sociology and musicology have focused on successful trajectory analyses like those of David Bowie (^{Sedeño-Valdellos, 2009}), PJ Harvey (^{Gardner, 2016}; ^{Burns & Lafrance, 2002}) or Lady Gaga (^{Davisson, 2013}), artists who knew how to combine all the artistic facets (both mediatic and audiovisual, public profile and musical side) in their musical careers. They managed their public image using music videos and all kinds of visual performances. As we said, transmedia logic in cultural production is transforming the relationship with the music fan, offering many ways to enter a personal narrative world that is constantly expanding and can be developed. The visual album is one of those cultural artifacts that is planned as a transmedia communication strategy; it produces an innovative way of mediating and directing, in the case of the musical artist, his personality and his fame.

At this point, its precedents should be emphasized. Concept albums were well-known devices in the industry in the seventies, music projects in which pop artists proposed a themes-based narrative, which is no longer limited to simple lyrics, or words, but aspires to longterm sustainable narratives. As ^{Shute (2013}) argues “they try to take advantage of the energy of popular music, and at the same time stretch the scope of their musical style, to incorporate extended themes and arguments”.

Sgt Pepper’s Lonely hearts Club Band by The Beatles (1967), Bob Dylan’s Blonde on blonde (1966), and Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie (1940) were the first albums with an innovative and total proposal that brought together the musical project and the cover design, including the lyrics of the songs. It’s a creative cross-fertilization between photographs, designers, record labels and musicians at the service of a musical idea, with difference according to musical scenes, subcultures and genres (^{De Ville, 2003}; ^{Thorgerson, 1982}). Moreover, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie (1972), The Wall by Pink Floyd (1979), Year Zero by Nine Inch Nails (2007) or Mylo Xiloto by Coldplay (2011), adapted this formula during the following decades.

As an evolution, the visual album brings a more evolved format, like a general storytelling and metanarrative, which is part of the tradition of popular music research for greater authenticity, in which the performative part (concerts), traditional media (visual formats) and new media (social networks, online media) come together to produce a complete narrative (^{Burns, 2016}; ^{Jeffery, 2017}). This media ubiquity channel is the most appropriate ecosystem to connect to today’s audience/consumer of popular music and its genres. Some reknown visual albums are Rings Around The World by Super Furry Animals (2001), ODDSAC by Animal Collective (2010), Valtari Mystery Film Experiment from Valtari by Sigur Rós (2012), Hi Custodian by Dirty Projectors (2012), Runaway by Kanye West (2010), K-12by Melanie Martinez (2019), Electra Heartby Marina and the Diamonds (2012), The Odyssey by Florence and The Machine (2016), Double Dutchess by Fergie (2017), Black Water by Maruv (2018), Purpose: The Movement by Justin Bieber (2015), blue by iamamiwhoami (2014), When I get home by Solange (2016), Mis Planes son Amarte by Juanes (2017), Kisses by Anitta (2019) and Reconstruçao by Thiago Iorc (2019).³

The visual album Biophilia by Bjork, is a visual album that radicalizes the experimental component. With an extreme artistic reference -a mix of songs, games and music videos- develops the interactivity of the format. The user/fan needs are what improve their musical learning and they can enjoy an online version and an interactive version (^{Dibben, 2014}).

There are several methods, but they all combine visual, sound and textual material with the correspondence of a track from a sound album with a visual piece to compose “audiovisual product that is directly related to the music of an album by the same artist” (^{Harrison, 2014}, pp. 16-17). Harrison (2014) defines it as a “large audio-visual expressions related to film or music video that showcase music from an audio album” (p. 10) and in general it can be configured as an audiovisual track for each audio track or displayed continuously as a movie. In a visual album, there is a tension between movie and music video, between the whole length of a movie -at least similar to the sum of all singles- and the episodic unity of a video for one single track. It can count on the addition of episodes, introductions, epilogue and all sorts of micro-tracks, even to the point of forming whole movies.

These visual texts have a double condition: they are extensive as a whole, like films or medium-length films, but simultaneously divisible into chapters. As a result, they get a message very compacted in motifs, visual associations, and quotations that are forever ready to become viral and shared on social networks. In fact, Cara ^{Harrison (2014}) found mechanisms that unified the messages, such as repetitive patterns of motifs and uses, scenographic objects, props, characters and places, which were visual leitmotifs. The idea around a visual motif generically gives a name to a theme, idea or visual resources that evokes the viewer’s knowledge and visual culture.

They display a double component, a reference to previous visual works and another of originality. As ^{Chandler and Munday (2013}) argue, a visual motif is “a theme [...] whose purpose is to represent or symbolize a person, object, place, idea, state of mind, supernatural force, or any other ingredient in a dramatic work” (para. 1).

Case Studies

Conclusions

The music industry has changed in these years, to a large extent following a readaptation to technical possibilities, initially unfavorable for it, due to digitization, to later develop exponentially and hybridize with all the audiovisual and entertainment industries. With a growing need to catch the attention of the audience, music projects have had to rethink themselves in order to survive in today’s market.

Therefore, as a measure against this uncertainty, notions of identity and celebrity dominates popular music culture. The music video industry is undergoing continuous transformation, still essential for multimedia promotion of music and maintaining its central role in the platformization of content and the current transmedia ecosystem. In response to growing audiovisualization in contemporary culture, the music industry has created visual albums, like a global proposal for a musical work, album, and career, which goes beyond the limits and boundaries of a movie, picture, or video.

This work was primarily intended to demonstrate how visual motifs provide unity and coherence in visual albums and in narratives for musical personalities, in other words, for music artists. Videos of visual albums by Beyoncé (Black is King), Rosalía (El Mal Querer), and Janelle Monáe (Dirty Computer) allow the artists to construct their own storyworlds. They try to consolidate atmospheres, and visual motifs and compositions in response to lyrics, music parameters and music genre, as a proposal that builds a self-expressive representation of the artist and is a mixture of themes, plots and other codes of visual structure (use of colour, clothing, locations...).

The use of visual motifs allows the creation of visual content that is based on a unitary tone of emotion: through them, there is a visualized performativity, where corporeality is transfigured into an image. Its centrifugal strategy allows the dispersion of visual content towards other mediation windows (social networks, live shows and performance) of musical artists. Its parts or episodes generate a large number of visual references to other previous texts, other music videos. These visual figures maintain and perpetuate the circulation of texts.

As a result of the hybridization of two models, Beyoncé has created a variety of visual motifs with Black is King: one is more narrative, focusing on the world of The Lion King, and the other is performance-based, focusing on the representation and design of the artist’s personal and social identities.

On the other hand, the mechanisms of cultural appropriation multiply in messages as intertextual as El Mal querer’s music videos: they explode with meanings and senses, creating new distribution channels in search of new audiences. In Dirty computer, dancing bodies are another element that contributes to the construction of meaning in visual albums. Monaé has created a fresco on sexual liberation, and she has chosen to build a queer identity in the African-American community and to continue with her activist objectives of denouncing certain dangers related to technology.