93-’99 Revisited: Music Video Screening #3 with Alex G. Weheliye

For the last of three events in this series, E. Jane has invited Malcom S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media Alex G. Weheliye to be the guest selector.

ASL Interpretation will be provided.

In the nineties, the music video as a genre was in flux between an uninspired medium and a site in which to create a significant cinematic oeuvre. In the beginning of the decade, MTV began recognizing the importance of directors’ creative contributions by featuring their credits at the start and end of their works. With a reinvigorated status comparable to motion pictures, the music video became an experimental medium with increasing public access, revealing the technical range of moving images and, through projected fantasies, beguiling viewers with the possibilities for their own lives. The “rewind” is inherent to the experience of music videos, enabling us to watch them repeatedly. Like any good film (which 90’s music video directors certainly considered their works to be), we are rewarded through new readings each time.

Throughout the Session, Artists, Musicians, and Thinkers will be invited to select 15 minutes of their favorite music videos from 1993-1999, sharing memories of their first viewing and how they feel about the videos now. How do these videos hold up in our present moment, and are there things these videos showed us that we are longing for now? Did they plant seeds in bloom in our collective American culture, or Black American culture, specifically?