Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema

by Carol Vernallis

Unruly Media argues that we are the crest of a new international style in which sonic and visual parameters become heightened and accelerated. This audiovisual turn calls for new forms of attention. Post-classical cinema, with its multi-plot narratives and flashy style, fragments under the influence of audiovisual numbers and music-video-like sync. Music video becomes more than a way of selling songs. YouTube's brief, low-res clips encompass many forms and foreground reiteration, graphic values and affective intensity. These three media are riven by one a trajectory from YouTube through music video to the new digital cinema reveals commonalities, especially in the realms of rhythm, texture and form.

This is the first book to account for the current audiovisual landscape across medium and platform, and it demonstrates that attending equally to soundtrack and image reveals how these media work and how they both mirror and shape our experience.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This covers a lot of interesting ground, but it’s also very repetitive (with quite a few phrases reoccurring verbatim in a few places) and keeps getting lost in the clutter of its textual analysis. The manuscript really needed at least one more round of editorial work, as it’s also full of annoying errors like misspelled names and inaccurate movie titles.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very fond of this book, but the quality is uneven. The first half, though repetitive, is phenomenal. Several of the chapters are up there as some of my favorites ever written about film. In 2021 when I taught a class on sound & media, I assigned the students to read two chapters from this book.

However, the second half, and in general the YouTube and music video sections, are far weaker (which is disappointing, because musicology seems to be Vernallis' specialty). Part of the issue is that the content is overly specific. Of course in a topic as ludicrously broad as this (encompassing almost all of digital media) it's impossible to be comprehensive, but I find Vernallis' approach unsatisfying. I come to the book to learn about the interactions of film, music video, and YouTube, not to read dozens of pages of seemingly aimless musings about specific music videos or directors. I'm not sure what I can learn or take away from these pages. Vernallis is clearly brilliant, but I get the feeling that the majority of the book does not do her justice.

That said, the section on film for me is easily enough to justify the read. I find myself coming back to it again and again to admire Vernallis' eccentric insights which quite frankly have changed the way I see media.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book on the state of contemporary popular visual culture.

[Jenny Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although the structure is a bit strange, the information and analysis is excellent. First book on digital cinema sound.

[Mills College Library]

302.231 V529 2013