The Counter-Poetics of Rhythm in the Videos for Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope

• In Event: Notes Across the Diaspora: Pop Music and Transnational Identity

Abstract

The music video is a space for Black cultural producers to manipulate audiovisual’s formal and narrative aesthetics to experiment with the (re)presentation of Black culture. My study examines how the videos for Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope, aesthetically, draw from the wealth of global Black diasporic culture to reflect upon the expansive and quotidian nature of Blackness. Utilizing the music video’s sense of immediacy (via the tv or the iPhone), Jackson’s “Got 'til It’s Gone" and “Together Again” intervene on the level of the personal and haptic to rethink the ways in which past can be remixed through cultural performance.

Presenter

• Ayanna Dozier, McGill University