Note: An extended written version of this research appears as a chapter in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Popular Music Analysis.1 The video essay format, championed here by JPMS, proves especially fruitful in approaching a multimedia artist such as Anderson, affording insights into her unique transmedia storytelling through the employment of words, images and music rather than the written text alone.
Laurie Anderson traverses various media, offering fragmentary stories via multimodal outputs that involve image as well as sound: film, installation, live performance and music video all oscillate around and extend the traditional album format. By drawing audio-visual ideas across platforms and through projects, over four decades she has continued to open up the idea of large-scale, expanded forms of music video many years before the recent popularity of long-play video forms. Yet Anderson’s expanded projects do not arise through conventional means of “transmedia storytelling,” whereby paratexts offer...
University of California Press