University courses on global entertainment media often privilege film and television. Meanwhile, media studies survey courses that are not explicitly named as “global,” “world,” or “international” in scope tend to focus on the national context wherever one’s university happens to be situated, and/or the culturally hegemonic texts that originate in the U.S. and UK. This essay proposes that both kinds of courses would benefit from the addition of music video, particularly non-Western music video, to the syllabus. I offer this proposition based on my experience having developed and taught a course titled “Global Music Video” at higher education institutions in both the Middle East and United States.

My Global Music Video course was initially designed as an upper-division undergraduate seminar to help students apply and expand the knowledge they had gained in introductory film and television studies courses. In its current 10-week iteration, the course is designed to welcome both media and communication majors and non-majors, and fulfills a number of distribution requirements for undergraduates across the university. As such, it is still structured as something of a survey, offering students an overview of the form’s history as well as opportunities to analyze and discuss its formal and aesthetic patterns, its ideological and cultural implications, and its variety of production and reception contexts around the world. We discuss, for example, what Anamaria Tamayo Duque calls the “four bodies” that Shakira performs alongside Wyclef Jean in her video for “Hips Don’t Lie” (2006), making sense of the ways in which she performs the specificity and authenticity of a “virginal” woman from Barranquilla, Colombia while simultaneously performing the role of a “transnational pan-Caribbean ambiguous Other.”[1] This allows us to discuss the central function of the dancing body in the music video, to further unpack the Shakira star text (via other videos and online fan discourse), and to examine the cultural flows of what Paul Gilroy terms the Black Atlantic.[2] We also take up S. Heijin Lee’s figuration of Psy as a “trickster” in “Gangnam Style” (2012), considering how we might read him as covertly highlighting U.S. neocolonialism and militarism in South Korea.[3] This discussion, which also touches on Psy’s masculinity, has recently opened up ample room to consider a topic of great interest to current students: the South Korean boyband BTS.

This essay offers both an argument as to why one should consider teaching music videos from around the world and a case study demonstrating how one might go about doing so. Part I highlights three major benefits of teaching music video, especially non-Western music video: its practicality, topical flexibility, and potential for comparativism. Part II provides a sample lesson plan for teaching Kenyan music video.

Part I: Why Teach Global Music Video

Practicality

At the 2021 virtual SCMS workshop “Teaching ‘Global’ Media,” many participants noted the difficulty of obtaining access to non-Western television, especially with English subtitles, for their courses. This challenge is even present for those who primarily teach film. In some markets, Netflix has helpfully expanded its catalogue in the past few years (e.g. adding more Nigerian films), but we cannot always rely on these subscription online catalogues to be available. Music videos, which in most countries have been released directly to YouTube and Vevo for the past twenty years, are much easier to access. In my experience, even landmark pre-2000 videos from most video cultures have been uploaded to YouTube by record labels or fans.

Those of us with restricted or split-up class hours often also face the challenge of duration, especially when teaching texts like Bollywood films or multiple television programs: How can we hold in-class screenings the week’s text(s) represent more than three hours of screen time? Here again, music videos provide an easy alternative, with average runtime under five minutes. It is thus practical to screen a selection of several music videos back-to-back with plenty of time for analysis and discussion in-between or afterwards.

Topical Flexibility

As hybrid texts whose production and reception contexts vary worldwide, music videos are useful case studies for achieving a range of course objectives. In courses focused on media content, there is plenty of fodder for comparative discussions about representations and performances of identity (race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc.), ideological and political messaging, and even themes such as labor, trauma, coming-of-age, community, and so on. Formal analysis courses could discuss editing strategies, the relationship between sound and image, mise-en-scène or cinematography patterns, and much more. Courses on media industry studies could compare production processes in terms of corporate production by music labels versus independent production. Indeed, my own Global Music Video course integrates all of these, alongside interrogations of the relationship between the local and the global.

In explicitly “global” courses, a week or unit on music video cultures can forge connections to both other units in the course and broader postcolonial or globalization scholarship. The multidisciplinary nature of existing scholarship on music video means that you can slot the lesson(s) easily into your syllabus, and if you choose to, take the opportunity to highlight media’s relationship to concepts they might have encountered in other “global studies” courses from other disciplines. For example, Vamsee Juluri’s reception study of nationalistic Indian music videos in Hyderabad, India allows for a discussion of Edward Said’s concept of orientalism: Juluri found that the emerging (relatively affluent) post-liberalization youth culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Hyderabad proudly identified with music video images of Indianness based in Western stereotypes such as the snake charmer.[4]

Comparativism

There is a temptation, when teaching music video, to focus on the “top” videos that have been produced in the West (especially the United States and United Kingdom) over the past forty years, because these are usually the texts that both instructors and students are most familiar with. However, this narrow view risks hindering students’ understanding of how music videos are produced and distributed differently—as well as how they function differently as texts—in varying localities around the world. While these “local” videos from elsewhere often bear stylistic similarities to the dominant “global” aesthetic of music video established in the West, they also make significant departures due to culturally specific histories of performance and visual culture. Moreover, subtle distinctions in both style and lyrical content help elucidate tensions between competing value systems both locally and in relation to Western norms. Note that I do not advocate completely ignoring videos from the U.S., UK, Europe, and Australia, but rather decentering the dominant cultural outputs of these countries and placing them in conversation with other video cultures, even marginalized (e.g. indigenous) video cultures that emerge from the same areas.

Especially if you can only afford to devote a single week or class session to music video, I recommend a focused comparison between two video cultures. This can be particularly helpful if the two cultures share a commonality that is quite distant from more familiar Western video conventions. For example, I teach music videos from the Armenian diaspora and Papua New Guinea together in the same week of Global Music Video and assign scholarship on each that emphasizes the archival and memory aspects of both video cultures (see Suggested Readings below). Such an approach has the benefit of opening up a space for students to problematize their implicit assumptions about what music video is and does—and for the instructor to help them see how such assumptions are rooted in the Western video model.

Part II: How to Teach Non-Western Music Video

Here, I offer a “way through” Kenyan music video in a single class session. Kenyan music video provides the opportunity to discuss genre, pan-Africanism, hybridity (Kraidy), the social imaginary (Appadurai), friction (Tsing), sexuality, religion, and citizenship.[5] You can also talk about production, distribution, and reception processes.

Required Reading: Ekdale, Brian. “Global frictions and the production of locality in Kenya’s music video industry.” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 2 (2018): 211-227.

Suggested Reading: van Klinken, Adriaan. “Citizenship of love: The politics, ethics and aesthetics of sexual citizenship in a Kenyan gay music video.” Citizenship Studies 22, no. 6 (2018): 650-665.

Primary Screenings:

Sauti Sol, “Nishike” (2014)

Sanaipei Tande, “Mfalme Wa Mapenzi” (2014)

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis ft. Mary Lambert, “Same Love” (2012)

Love Attack, “Same Love” (2016)

K24 TV, “KFCB bans ‘Same Love’ music video, urges people not to circulate the video” (2016)

Secondary Screenings:

Sauti Sol, “Suzanna” (2020)

The Kansoul, “Bablas (Hangover)” (2017)

Akothee ft. MC Galaxy, “Oyoyo” (2018)

Sifaeli Mwabuka, “Shuka Tukuone Mungu Wetu” (2018)

Lesson Outline

1. Terminology: On the Board

Begin class by working through some of the terminology in Ekdale’s article, which may be unfamiliar (depending on previous lessons). Write the following key terms on the board and “crowdsource” working definitions from the students: hybridity, social imaginary, friction. Discuss how they are used/applied in the article.

2. Central Ideas/Argument: Group Discuss

Unpack collaborative, combative, and competitive frictions as they apply to the production, distribution, and reception of music video in Kenya. If students seem stumped or quiet, split students into three smaller groups and ask each group to prepare a brief summary of one type.

3. Video Discourse: Group Analysis

Following Ekdale, pull up the recent YouTube comments on both Sauti Sol’s “Nishike” and Sanaipei’s “Mfalme Wa Mapenzi.” Decide as a group whether you still see a clear split between those critical of the video for being too Western and those proud of it for promoting Kenya before the world. Also consider pointing out that Blaqy’s “Money Maker” was removed from YouTube in 2020/2021 for violating its “community standards” and invite discussion around this in relation to Ekdale’s account of the video’s reception in Kenya.NOTE: I will often have a few students who are big fans of Sauti Sol and who, at this juncture, want to discuss their more recent videos’ attempts at truly worldwide/global appeal. If time permits, consider screening a recent video of theirs and analyze both content and comments as a group.

4. Sexual Citizenship OR Genre and Pan-Africanism: Group Discuss

There are two possible directions to take for the final segment, depending on how this lesson fits in amongst other course topics, whether or not you have assigned the suggested reading, and whether or not students demonstrate interest in the representation of queerness in music video. (In my experience, they usually do.)

a. Sexual Citizenship and Pan-AfricanismIf students have not read the van Klinken piece, briefly summarize the context of sexual and religious politics in Kenya. If they have not already been assigned to watch both versions of “Same Love” for homework, screen them. Also consider screening the news clip linked above, wherein the Kenya Film Classification Board bans Love Attack’s video. Introduce van Klinken’s concept of sexual citizenship and prompt students to discuss the video’s queer intervention. Ask them to describe its relationship to Christianity, and highlight the ways in which van Klinken sees the video’s “act” of sexual citizenship as not just Kenyan but also (pan-)African.

b. Genre and Pan-AfricanismAlternatively, skip van Klinken and flesh out some of Ekdale’s background information about genre in Kenyan music video, inviting students to think about how the dominant musical genres in Kenya (hip-hop and gospel) relate to geopolitical contexts and demonstrate further hybridity. Consider screening clips of The Kansoul’s “Bablas (Hangover)” (2017), whose title and lyrics are in Sheng, to demonstrate linguistic hybridity in Kenyan hip-hop, and then Akothee and MC Ggalaxy’s “Oyoyo” (2018) as a starting point to discuss pan-African solidarity. You may want to follow these with Sifaeli Mwabuka’s “Shuka Tukuone Mungu Wetu” (2018) to provide a concrete example of the popularity of gospel videos, particularly in rural areas, as an alternative to hip-hop’s urban cosmopolitanism.

5. Wrap-Up

As time permits, consider activating the comparative approach mentioned above by asking students to “zoom out” and discuss how these Kenyan videos compare to what they know of Western videos. Then reinforce and invite students to summarize the key concepts learned; connect and transition to the upcoming lesson.

Other Suggested Readings

Adriaans, Rik. “Staging Sassoun: Memory and music video in post-soviet Armenia.” Social Analysis 60, no. 3 (2016): 17-35.

Hayward, Philip. “Dancing to a pacific beat: music video in Papua New Guinea.” In Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones, edited by Roger Beebe and Jason Middleton, 152-173. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Elouardaoui, Ouidyane. “Contemporary Arab Music Video Clips: Between Simulating MTV’s Gender Stereotypes and Fostering New Ones.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 112-133.

Roy, Anjali Gera. “Filming the Bhangra Music Video.” In More Than Bollywood: Studies in Indian Popular Music, edited by Gregory D. Boothe and Bradley Shope, 142-159. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.


Pamela Krayenbuhl is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Tacoma. She studies the relationship between moving images and dance, with a particular interest in the racial, gender, and sexual politics of dance on screen. Her current book project looks at the performance of race and/as masculinity by male dance stars in midcentury U.S. film and television.

    1. Anamaria Tamayo Duque, “Body, Space, and Authenticity in Shakira’s Video for ‘My Hips Don’t Lie,’” in The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture, ed. Toby Miller, 323-329 (London: Routledge, 2014). ↑

    2. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). ↑

    3. S. Heijin Lee, “The Politics and Promises of ‘Gangnam Style,’” in Pop Empires: Transnational and Diasporic Flows of India and Korea, ed. S Heijin Lee, Monika Mehta, and Robert Ji-Song Ku (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2019). ↑

    4. Vamsee Juluri, “Music television and the invention of youth culture in India,” Television & New Media 3, no. 4 (2002): 367-386; Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 1978.) ↑

    5. Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). ↑