Cities in music videos: Audiovisual variations on London’s neoliberal skyline

Abstract

Chinese

Despite the resurgence of music video clips in the YouTube era, they have not received attention as a specific subject of inquiry in either cultural or urban geography. This article is aimed at providing a full consideration of music videos with a focus on the urban realm. In particular, the paper concentrates on how neoliberal iconic buildings and city skylines emerge in music videos by using London as a case study. Drawing from recent developments within architectural geography and urban morphology, as well as in the geocultural subfields of music geography, media geography and film geography, the paper shows how a partial return to critical traditional interests and text-based research styles could be still useful to appreciate the mutable, fluid, and affective ways in which skylines are mediated. The empirical part of the paper provides an analysis of three music videos set in London and with lyrics and music that refer to a mood or feeling ascribed to London’s iconic architecture.¹

Keywords

architectural geography London music video geography skyline staged atmosphere

Introduction

Even the disputed skyscrapers and the maligned Canary Wharf give a thrill. I was at times involved in the battles against these latter developments. […] But it was with a kind of guilty delight that with a friend […], I rode round and round some years ago on the Docklands Light Railway. (Massey, 2007: 29)

But any critical disappointment that emerged could still be interrupted periodically by the exuberant affirmative energies of the movement of the video every time it is viewed. (McCormack, 2013: 156–157)

The transition from the MTV-dominated era of the 1980s and 1990s to the present YouTube era has given rise to a new music video realm. As Edmond (2014) explains, after their golden years between about 1985 and 1996, video clips suffered from the general crisis in the music industry, with record companies cutting music video budgets and major music television networks turning to more conventional programming. Meanwhile, the natural home for music videos moved from television to the internet, and video clips became ubiquitous on many video aggregates and social media sites. The mainly televisual model of flow exhibition has been replaced by the searchable, on-demand, interactive online exhibition. Viewing statistics clearly show that music videos have become some of the most watched of all online content and thus a fundamental part of online video culture. Whereas the value of music video for record labels was almost entirely promotional (i.e. promotion of a song or artist) in the previous era, music videos now serve additional economic functions and are directly lucrative with the selling of advertising around the video content (Edmond, 2014: 310). The on-demand nature of online exhibition is in its turn commercially controlled and capitalised by the targeting of users’ preferred interests. Despite their past success and present resurgence, music videos have not received attention as a specific subject of inquiry from geographers, except for some references in popular music and media geography (Connell and Gibson, 2002; Kong, 1995; McCormack, 2013; Pesses, 2009). Music videos frequently provide audio-views of urban scenes but, surprisingly, have not specifically attracted the attention of urban scholars. This paper aims at endorsing a full consideration of music video clips, with a focus on the urban realm. Drawing from areas of study such as architectural geography and urban morphology, as well as from geocultural subfields such as music geography, media geography and film geography, we, the authors, will concentrate on a case study of London’s iconic neoliberal architecture and analyse a sample of music videos that ‘perform’ the city’s skyline in various ways.

The first section of the paper introduces the urban subject and context we refer to. Subsequently, a literary review positions our stance within the recent debates that have emerged in architectural and media geography, showing how a partial return to traditional interests and research styles could still be useful in exploring how cities are featured in music videos. The methodological section explains our employment of case-study research and highlights the way in which a geographical/urban focus can be applied to music videos. As for the empirical part of this paper, our close reading considers three video clips from different music genres. Our focus is on the videos’ settings, not the place described in the lyrics. Except for one video (Hill Manors by Plan B), London is not the theme of the songs. More properly, the lyrics and music refer to a mood or feeling, which is ascribed to London’s skyline. As Whiteley et al. (2004: 3) explain, musical representations, and in the case of music videos, the complex assemblages of music, words and images, ‘tell particular stories about the local, and impose collectively defined meanings and significance on space. At the same time, however, it is important to note that such authorings of space reproduce not one, but a series of competing local narratives’. The ambiguity inherent in music videos helps in exploring the adjustments between conformant and resistant positions and between rational/critical considerations and emotional impacts (such as those ‘guilty delights’ of Doreen Massey or those ‘exuberant affirmative energies’ stressed by Derek McCormack above). In the conclusion, we highlight how the analysis of music videos can contribute to an appreciation of the multiple and nuanced ways in which skylines are mediated/practiced in the neoliberal age.

London’s neoliberal skyline

Iconic architecture is considered a hegemonic project of the capitalist global system nurtured by the cultural ideology of consumerism (Sklair, 2010). As McNeill (2005: 46) suggests, ‘tall buildings give cities identity through “skyline”, [that is] an identifiable array of icons’. Following McNeill (2005) again, the Canary Wharf Tower in London is a clear example of how tall buildings have been mobilised as civic markers by the representational strategies of the economic and political elites of the neoliberal city. Indeed, the rise of the neoliberal iconic building in London started in the late 1980s with the opening of the London’s ‘eastward corridor’, the redevelopment of the Docklands area, and the creation of the complex of Canary Wharf. Cesar Pelli’s One Canada Square (the centrepiece of Canary Wharf development) was completed in 1991, and the architect described it as ‘a prism with a pyramidal top in the traditional form of the obelisk, which is the most archetypal way of creating a vertical architectural sign’ (cited without source in Hardingham, 2002: 279). And in fact, since then, despite the following enormous criticism in terms of aesthetic incoherence and economic contradiction, Canary Wharf became an integral part of London’s skyline. In the following years, after a period of stagnation in the construction of tall buildings, the City of London Corporation switched its strategy, and the planning approval for the Heron Tower (now Salesforce Tower) opened the door to other similar projects. The Swiss Re Tower at 30 St Mary’s Axe in the City of London, which was completed in 2003, marked the beginning of a new period in which tall buildings were expected to make bold impressions on the city skyline.

As Jencks (2005: 13) put it (writing 10 years ago):

Now every new corporate headquarters seeks to be an icon, has to have a nickname that sums it up, a one-liner, a bullet point that journalists love to hate, love to spice up their workaday prose – ‘erotic gherkin’, or ‘shard’, or ‘crystal beacon’. Tall buildings are no longer content to be concealed phallic symbols, they have to come out of the closet, declare their sex, strut their stuff.

As Appert and Montes (2015: 1) have eloquently summarised, the recent ‘turn to tall buildings’ in London derives from the instrumentation of both architecture and the urban landscape to rebrand London in the global economy, at a time when the metropolises of emerging market economies have engaged in a formidable ‘race for the sky’. A key figure that led to the rise of tall buildings in the City of London was Ken Livingstone, elected Mayor of London in 2000 (Charney, 2007; McNeill, 2002), who prefigured a ‘sprawling up’ of London and strongly promoted iconic architecture. The new skyline, populated with vertical signs, was meant to give a message about London in the global arena of neoliberal urbanism and to reaffirm the global city status of London, its confidence and appeal. Vertical and iconic new signs in the City of London are, among others, the Leadenhall Building and 20 Fenchurch Street.

Another cluster of city icons is found in the Southern riverside. Here, some iconic interventions (the London Eye, Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern) are included in the wave of redevelopments related to the celebration of the Millennium, while the major architectural developments have been the London City Hall and, above all, the London Bridge Tower, or the Shard, which was completed in 2012, becoming London’s tallest skyscraper and the new (and contested: see Appert, 2011) protagonist of the city skyline. In this case, as in the East End redevelopment, the changes in the skyline were also endorsed as markers of urban regeneration: The neoliberal architectural sign is legitimised by political/economic discourses as a means of extending the world’s city-type opportunities closer to deprived neighbourhoods (Appert and Montes, 2015: 28).

Introduced as a specific subject of study by Wayne Attoe’s (1981) didactic book, the metropolitan skyline has recently been refocused within the field of urban morphology and with specific reference to the paradigmatic case of London, owing to the fact that conflicts are emerging about the vertical development and privatisation of skylines in a growing number of cities (Appert and Montes, 2014). The criticism of the politics of urban verticality, moreover, is gaining new momentum. According to Graham and Hewitt (2013), while critical urban research in the anglophone realm is still dominated by a flattening of imaginaries based on the cartographic matrix (horizontalism), the vertical qualities of the contemporary processes of urban neoliberalisation demand stronger attention on verticality. Significantly, one of the promising example of this new line of interest that Graham and Hewitt (2013: 73) endorse is McNeill’s (2005) account of vertical relationalities which surround the proliferation of urban tall buildings. A key agenda for Graham and Hewitt’s vertical urbanism is the emergence of vertically stratified gated communities provoked by the current vertical splintering of cities through iconic as well as more prosaic high-rise residential, corporate and hotel skyscrapers. As Ayoub (2009) stresses with regard to London, tall buildings become not only icons symbolising global power but also capsular elite spaces of social secession. London, indeed, is a paradigmatic case in which tall, iconic buildings and the city skyline enliven a politics of design, as well as a burning debate.

Researching iconic architecture through music videos

Skyline atmospheres and their mediation

Appert and Montes (2014: 76) state that the key drivers of the changing skyline are ‘not only the hard economics of real estate, but also images, representations, and identity claims’. As McQuire (2008: 46) suggests, iconic buildings and the mediations involving them ‘enable the complex reality of the modern city to be reduced to a series of discrete visual unities that can be easily manipulated and readily consumed’. Iconic buildings, indeed, are mainly considered as distant, symbolic objects operating within a ‘visual battleground’ (Tavernor and Gassner, 2010: 104), and as such the mediations about them have attracted much criticism from scholars. Following Kaika (2010: 465), London’s (as with other cities) new icons are the perfect neoliberal objects for real estate speculation and perfect fetishised objects that feature prominently in the city’s imaginary depictions, such as advertisement or postcards. Indeed, ‘Cinematic confections’ (McNeill, 2005: 47) have been preferred as subjects of investigation for critically grasping iconic buildings’ and skylines’ imaginative and symbolic geographies. With our paper, we would like to turn the attention to music videos as mediations of iconic buildings and neoliberal skylines. Moreover, drawing from recent theorisation within the geography of architecture and music video scholarship, we would like to stress that the peculiar textual form of music videos could open up more nuanced ways of critically appreciating the mediation of iconic architecture. As Latham et al. (2009: 85–86) note, whereas ‘commercial or state-sponsored monuments are visually arresting’ and can threaten to occlude a discussion of other aspects of architecture, further research perspectives are needed to grasp the multifaceted processes through which architecture (and its image) is practiced and perceived.

As a ‘neoliberal object’, the neoliberal skyline posses an affective bearing, or a ‘tone’, and functions atmospherically (Anderson, 2016: 743–744). Music videos, which fundamentally produce moods or atmospheres, can be considered as means through which a ‘skyline atmosphere’ is staged. Indeed, the recent literature on ‘ambiances’ (the mood associated with a place, following situationists’ psychogeography) and ‘atmospheres’ (the sensuous and emotional feel of a place) have recently focused on the orchestration of atmospheres, especially with regard to architectonic settings. Interestingly, the staged atmosphere, being hazy in nature, is addressed by recent literature, not as a mere deliberate instrument in gaining political control or commercial profit, but as something which ‘cannot be controlled in any simple and unambiguous way’ or something which ‘opens up for ambivalence, contestation, or lack of compliance’ (Bille et al., 2015: 34, 35). Whereas the ‘normative’ atmosphere associated with a neoliberal tall building or skyline (the business-related neoliberal tone) constitues a prototype and often feeds ‘generic images’ (Grubbauer, 2010), music videos are part of those practices of manifacturing atmospheres that instead produce variations, disruptions and reformulations of the standard imagery (Bille et al., 2015: 336–337).

Architectural geographies

The emphasis on the symbolic meaning (representationalism) of architecture has been explicitly diminished within recent developments of architectural geography. Jacobs and Merriman (2011) state there is a move beyond textual, symbolic and iconographic approaches to reading architecture and towards a more practice-informed and non-representational approach. As Kraftl (2010) puts it, the established way to study architecture since the 1980s has been to critique in a radical/Marxist vein the political-economic imperatives inherent to the production of architectural forms and symbolism. This investigation was centred on the role of systems of representation, systems including the symbolism of buildings themselves and the representations/commodification of buildings in photographs and other media. Kraftl (2010) goes on to argue that recent approaches stress non-representational aspects such as inhabitation, bodily practices, materiality and emotions, whose impacts exceed symbolic meaning and cognition. Nonetheless, Kraftl acknowledges that the critical reading of the politics of representation, so characteristic of earlier geographies of architecture, has ‘rightfully’ (Kraftl, 2010: 406) endured within architectural geography. Elsewhere, however, he states that the purely ‘reading off’ symbolism does not attend to understanding buildings’ affective, performative, embodied or sensual dimensions. These ‘more than symbolic’, or ‘non-representational’ dimensions, it has been noted, emerge through dynamic encounters, events, practices and actions which involve different subjects and contingencies in the building’s life (Kraftl and Adey, 2008). Jacobs and Merriman (2011: 215), in their turn, affirm that scholarship on iconic buildings could be greatly enhanced by the idea that buildings are ‘mutable immobiles’ that are continually re-designed, re-made and re-animated through diverse activities in unpredictable ways.

Since the practice turn in architectural geography has produced a marked shift from (image) discourse analyses towards the increasing use of ethnography, here we apparently return to more traditional text-centred methodologies (the music video as audiovisual ‘text’ or ‘representation’ of spectacular architecture). Indeed, this paper aims to return to a representational geography of architecture (to study how iconic buildings are mediated) but simultaneously to utilise more recent notions from the latest trends in architectural geographies in considering how the skyline emerges in music videos in ways that are dynamic, mutable, emotional and atmospheric. Music videos, in fact, are primarily produced to communicate a mood (to such an extent that even quantitative analyses of emotional characterisation of music video clips have been provided: see Yazdani et al., 2013). While acknowledging the politics of urban representation embedded in video clips, it seems that videos are also dynamic frames within which architecture enacts and performs, and through which architecture may be variously encountered, experienced and even inhabited. As research on the feel of architecture, mood-caching environments, affective regimes of buildings and architectural atmospheres has shown, these qualities are often (but not exclusively) mobilised to explicitly commercial ends, and this requires a combination of critical readings of buildings with the appreciation of sensory and affective experiences (Kraftl, 2010: 410). The empirical part of this paper will concentrate on how music videos continually reshape the mood associated with London’s neoliberal skyline, thus amplifying the various ways in which the city skyline is brought into being.

Music video geographies

Recently, music theorists have embraced urban geography to develop forms of ‘urban musicology’. Works have been devoted to the role of popular music culture in rebranding post-industrial cities (Cohen, 2007) and to music’s increased role in characterising spaces within a dramatically changed, post-Fordist urban realm (Krims, 2007). Other works within different disciplinary fields have been devoted to identify urban ‘sound cultures’, or the sonic aesthetics associated with specific subcultures (Scanlan, 2014). Within geography, for instance, Harris (2014) showed how the music recorded in the early 1990s by experimental guitar bands from East London’s edgelands captured and responded to the marginal landscapes of the peripheral city. The sonic identity of cities has also been addressed with reference to associated visual landmarks (Keeling, 2011). While calling for a more robust application of city-focused research on popular music geography, Pesses (2009) analysed the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ musical references to Los Angeles through both sonic choices and images, thus highlighting the additional role of music videos in shaping urban identity.

Indeed, marginal references to music videos appear in the geographical literature on music. In a seminal article on geography and popular music, Kong (1995) called for the syncretic investigation of a range of intertextual musical materials, including video clips. Connell and Gibson (2002: 86) pointed out that ‘popular music illuminates place either through lyrics and visuals’, that videos frequently are tied to both generic and specific places and that videos are shared musical experiences which reflect or challenge attitudes about place. Other references to music videos can be found within media geography and particularly in McCormack’s (2013, 2014) work on dance and the mediatisation of moving bodies; he suggests exploring how non-narrative moving images, such as in music videos, generate affectively and kinaesthetically inhabitable worlds. McCormack (2013: 152) endorses the shift from decoding/criticising the symbolic and discursive power of music videos to appreciating them as ‘affective image-events’ that exceed political regimes. Despite the fact that moving images are incorporated in media economies, he argues, encounters with moving images are also occasions for experiencing a potential modification of these processes of incorporation through the excessive qualities of affect.

Our aim here is to provide a full consideration of the music video and to apply a city-centred approach to this particular media. Moreover, we intend to propose a nuanced, non-reductionist, ambiguous consideration of the connection between music videos and urban spaces. Urban musicologist Adam Krims (2007: 8) considered music videos as part of the range of possible, and more or less likely, urban representations that in any given time span, produce a ‘background structure of feeling’ of a city, or what he calls an urban ethos. Conversely, we would like to emphasise how music videos suggest discordant, slippery, varied feelings of the urban realm.

Methodology

Recent theoretical positions within audiovisual research posit that interpretations of audiovisuality are always ‘more-than-representational’, as they draw from unstable semiotic and cultural interpretations that bring together discursive formations and phenomenological responses, cultural conventions and sensual experiences (Richardson et al., 2013: 26–27). Recent methodological interventions in geographies of music have shown that scholars tend to examine music as a cultural signifier, an economic commodity, an expression of identity or a political action, thus neglecting the non-representational, often unspeakable basic qualities of musicking, such as emotion, evanescence, performativity, empathy, atmosphere and embodiment (Wood et al., 2007). In its turn, media geography is experiencing a reorientation from critiquing the dominant ideologies embedded in media to adopting more nuanced approaches, including non-representational styles of inquiry (Adams et al., 2014). For the purpose of this article, however, we found Sharp and Lukinbeal’s (2015) take on film geography particularly useful. Acknowledging the tendency to move from the interpretation of the filmic text to a reconceptualisation of film as an embodied and emotional event, the authors affirm that textual analysis remains a useful heuristic for film geography and that textual analysis can be expanded (and not elided) to accommodate non-textual, practice- and body-oriented, performative approaches. In this article, thus, we analyse music videos as audiovisual texts/representations, adopting at the same time a non-representational sensitivity, as suggested by Sharp and Lukinbeal for filmic texts. This approach, therefore, searches for compromise rather than opposition between representational and non-representational approaches.

As geographers, we were interested in applying a spatial focus to a close reading of music videos. In music videos, settings (interiors/exteriors) are often codified depending on the song’s genre or sonic features (e.g. an abandoned industrial site for heavy metal, expensive interiors for R&B songs, city streets for hip-hop). Rap videos, in particular, have been consistently committed to specific geographical locations, in part because their words are spoken, rather than sung (Vernallis, 2004: 78; see also Sigler and Balaji, 2013 about the presumed despatialisation and new commodification of places in hip-hop music videos). Despite these ostensibly generic depictions, a close viewing of videos can reveal more complex, unstable renderings. This paper aims to explore how contemporary video clips in different music genres capture London’s neoliberal iconic buildings. To be clear, the focus is not particularly on videos that best represent London. Although Sigler and Balaji (2013: 347) contend that skylines in music videos communicate a place-identity, we do not intend for our comparative reading to describe the dominant identity of London that music videos reproduce; rather the paper explores the ways in which videos express and perform multiple meanings, moods and atmospheres associated with London’s neoliberal skyline.

We apply a current methodology used in video music research (Vernallis, 2004: 199–206): the isolation of a single parameter of the video. Although a video’s message emerges from the complex interaction of all of its parts (music, lyrics and images) over time, we decided to take a single parameter –the spatial dimension and, in particular, London’s skyline – and consider the entirety of the video in this light. This choice does not imply a mere focus on the visual, since our (visual) research object, namely London’s neoliberal skyline, is analysed/felt as always variously embedded within the other components of the music video. The interpretation of images is inevitably influenced by sound and lyrics, since in music videos space is always visualised while music and words go on.

As for the screening process, after viewing more than 100 music videos set in London, we made a selection of three relevant videos for our case study. We have also uploaded a playlist on YouTube to display a larger selection of videos featuring London’s neoliberal skyline (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvowPx7-hXxqS1xy6RoopchFHll-xaDdZ). As the literature on case study research suggests (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Swanborn, 2010), the case selection is a ‘rational selection of one or more instances of a phenomenon’ in which samples are chosen ‘strategically’ (Bleijenbergh, 2010: 61), that is in a ‘purposive fashion’ (Seawright and Gerring, 2008: 295). Among the available case study types (typical, diverse, extreme, deviant, influential, most similar and most different cases: see Seawright and Gerring, 2008), we chose the ‘diverse case method’, which aims to illuminate a range of variations of a topic. Our subject of interest was London’s neoliberal skyline, and we composed a strategic, heterogeneous sample of three videos in which this (visual) skyline was embedded and whose songs (music and words) evoked a range of different moods, atmospheres and emotional experiences.

Performing London’s skyline: Case studies

Geography of protest (and fun?): London’s Ill Manors (2012)

Our ‘move’ across the selected music videos starts with the Ill Manors clip (2012, by Yann Demange; Figure 1). Followed by the homonymous film, it was released to promote a single written by English rapper, songwriter, actor and film director Ben Drew (in art Plan B). The song and clip provide a problematic reading of 21st-century London from Drew’s perspective as an insider, born and grown in Forest Gate, northeast London. Plan B intends to make the audio-viewer aware of the public prejudices against a certain populations of urban youth, who are guilty only of living in the wrong place. The artist addresses the 2011 London riots, neither celebrating nor approving of them, but trying to explain them as the consequence of stereotyping and excluding people who come from turbulent environments. Ill Manors itself is a riot song. Plan B’s lyrics depict a place of exclusion that acts as a synecdoche for other secluded boroughs of London. However, the music video and lyrics refer to a very specific place: northeast London, near the Olympic Village. This area is opposed to the capital city centre, represented by the iconic London skyline. It is a symbol of marginalised groups of people, while central London represents social indifference and mainstream economic and political power.

Figure 1.

Screenshots from Ill Manors video clip.

The music video does not present a linear narrative structure. The music is accompanied by scenes shot by director Yann Demange, caricatured cartoon-like scenes and news footage of the August 2011 riots. The images visually develop words and sentences from the lyrics that Plan B sings. London’s iconic buildings appear first, before the song starts. Here, the distant skyline with the profile of Canary Wharf serves as a typical establishing shot, though we believe that it does much more than that. The view from somewhere in northeast London is disturbed by long lines of smoke and environmental noise, such as sirens and alarms, which create an atmosphere of uneasiness and anxiety. The appearance of Canary Wharf somehow marks the original affiliation of Plan B to the ‘grime’ (UK garage rap) scene that emerged in East London during the early 2000s (he first appeared on the grime compilation Run the Road in 2005). Following Hancox (2013), who has described the origins of this underground genre and its protagonist Dizzee Rascal, the iconic presence of Canary Wharf’s clusters of skyscrapers has been inseparable from the experience of the East London crews that have grown beneath it in the East End at the beginning of the 2000s. An ambiguous fascination for One Canada Square is paralleled by Hancox to the ‘aspirational tendency’, or the desire to escape from disadvantage, expressed by the grime genre (the future city and alien gateway of Canary Wharf as the source of grimes’ unique incarnation of Afrofuturism).

However, the Ill Manors video produces a significant shift in focus from Canary Wharf to the skyline shaped by the more recent wave of tall buildings in central London, with the silhouette of The Shard functioning as an apex. It is worth noting that in this video, as well as in the following ones, these recent iconic buildings (together with Canary Wharf) have become ‘establishing shots’ for London (for the same process in films, see Brunsdon, 2007). Indeed, views of London can now omit classic landmarks and simply rely on shots of recent iconic architecture to communicate the setting to the audience. Plan B ascribes rebellion and rage to the neoliberal skyline of central London and suggests that if the surface of 21st-century London displays a global, powerful city, something unpleasant and dangerous is happening somewhere in the suburbs. The soil boils, social tensions increase, and smoke from explosions pollutes the positive ideas that the audience associates with the skyline.

In the Ill Manors video, cartoon-like scenes represent an absurd urban safari and deride politicians, while the other images present groups of mostly black people with menacing faces acting out staged scenes of illegal activities, fighting or break dancing. The main feeling produced is anger, with a strong vein of sarcasm. Stereotypes are criticised but not refuted. Plan B’s act of rebellion lies in the very fact of feeding inaccurate stereotypes, fuelling society’s misconceptions. These stereotyped representations of youth are intended to challenge those in society who do not understand the problems impeding a decent life in the manors and who find it easier to exclude that hard realty. The distant skyline symbolises these individuals. As Plan B explained in an interview about the Ill Manors film, ‘They [the characters in the film and videoclip] say, well, look, I’m never going to change the way you think of me so actually I’m going to play up to it and fuel the fire. In essence that’s what Ill Manors is about’ (quoted in Bainbridge, 2012).

Towards the end of the video, we see a riot-like explosion of a car against the background of the night-time cityscape. Placing the car before this specific setting seems no coincidence, for it strongly conveys the idea of destroying London and the representation of London in that very panoramic view. The skyline, thus, semiotically functions as a detached symbol, but it is also vividly materialised by the violent emotions of the performers, who seem to throw bombs against the skyline (instead of the car). The audio-viewers, who are directly addressed when a stone is thrown at them, become involved inside the rebellious, boiling frame of the clip through the extremely powerful, contagious union of lyrics, music and images. The emotional reaction, however, remains open to unpredictable outcomes. Music writer Dorian Lynskey (2012), who seriously analyses the social and cultural commentary of this video, describes how emotional reactions to it – and to the London it features – can surprise audio-viewers beyond any pondered reflection: ‘When Demange cuts from a staged car-burning to news footage of the real thing, the viewer gets a disconcerting taste of an aspect of the riots that liberal analyses tend to downplay: the fact that wanton destruction can be briefly cathartic and, whisper it, fun’. These exceeding emotional outcomes of the music video somehow also involve the featured neoliberal skyline, whose imaginary destruction can be briefly cathartic and, whisper it, fun.

Canary Wharf’s waste land: Urban emptiness in Getting Nowhere (2011)

Whereas the iconic profile of Canary Wharf is replaced by the more recently erected tall buildings in central London in the Ill Manors videoclip, the first neoliberal tall building of London regain centrality in the music video Getting Nowhere (2011, by Philip Sansom; Figure 2). Home to some of the world’s biggest banks, Canary Wharf is here revisited with a mood clearly affected by the 2008 financial crisis. The video was released to promote a single from the British electronic group Magnetic Man’s debut album. It does not follow a sequential storyline but consists of a series of scenes in which what we shall call ‘death knights’ ride on the almost empty Isle of Dogs. These figures wear hooded jumpers and have no faces. Four are bicycle acrobats, while a more traditional knight, dressed with a hooded cloak which covers his faceless head, rides a black horse. The four ride, spreading fear and terror throughout squalid, urban spaces. At the beginning of the video, the knights are in grey, prison-like apartment blocks, from which the audience spots the back of Canary Wharf’s towers. The apartment blocks are desolate. Only few people live there, alone and conscious that Death waits outside. Canary Wharf’s white-collar workers display frustration. One reads a newspaper whose the headline reads ‘World economy: Getting nowhere’. The newspaper bursts into flames, symbolising the precariousness of global finance. The video ends with images of Canary Wharf illuminated by flashes of lightning and, in the foreground, the four knights jumping into fictional urban nothingness.

Figure 2.

Screenshots from Getting Nowhere video clip.

The second main element indicating the location is the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which is exploited skilfully in the video as a symbolic vehicle travelling to a wasteland. Conducting dead knights to London’s other side, the DLR can be seen as a modern, robotic version of Charon, the ferryman of Hades. Canary Wharf serves as an establishing shot but also provides the conditions for the events that take place. This part of London is the cause, not the effect, of the intimidating presence of the death knights. They are a product of that specific environment. The audiovisual description re-creates a sensorial experience of fear, through both open screen frames on Canary Wharf at night and a series of places and spaces associated with urban emptiness, desolation and the unknown (the DLR railway tracks, barren fields, prison-like apartments, office buildings and, finally, night-time streets populated by a tramp, prostitute and lonely customer in a restaurant). Death and fear are prevalent even during the daytime, especially in those places where the financial world dictates the rhythm of the world economy.

Films and music video often revisit the image of the East End as London’s mythical dark side (Brunsdon, 2007: 150). Getting Nowhere is a case in point but with a difference. The East End is represented not by its traditional misty streets but by apartments, office blocks and Canary Wharf. The aesthetic development of sinister elements lurking in the docks corresponds to the cinematic tradition of the capital’s dark side, but here we are drawn to an alignment of Gothic darkness, architectural emblems and financial crisis that suggests the idea of a spectral or zombie financial capital and money’s living death (see Botting, 2010: 159–160). As Hancox (2013) recently observed in his analysis of the grime scene in East London, the district of skyscrapers that symbolises our age – with its failed super banks and private security guards – is something different from the pre-crisis Canary Wharf that fed the imagination of grime’s crews of the early 2000s. Getting Nowhere’s treatment of this sector of the neoliberal skyline is affected by apocalyptic suspense, a sense of crisis and anxiety, showing affinities with other interventions on the crisis-related apocalyptic visual imagery of Canary Wharf (see for instance Kioskcollective, 2011).

A line in the chorus of the video clip –‘Feel like we’ve been getting nowhere’ – influences viewers’ interpretation of and the meaning they ascribe to the setting. Canary Wharf is the nowhere, a disturbing no-man’s land; behind its skyscrapers, only a few solitary individuals struggle to live in a condition of isolation. The lightning symbolises the horror lurking behind the skyscrapers. This striking, fatalistic shot reminds viewers of a 21st-century apocalyptic landscape, with alienating towers representing the end of the world and of social life. The interrelation between music and images creates a general sense of bleakness, although the music is not grave enough to evoke an explicitly negative mood. The Gothic location of Getting Nowhere is not so historical, nor dark, nor criminal as other Gothic Londons (Botting, 2010: 159). The video’s theme is getting nowhere, and if the lyrics do not define this spatial concept, the images apply it to Canary Wharf and the surrounding area of grim tower blocks and anonymous offices. We, the audio-viewers, wander within a disturbing atmosphere, feeling a sense of emptiness and the impossibility of determining a definite mood in the video. In the final sequence, when we react, behind their backs, to the fatal jump of the young knights from a roof in front of the top of the Canary Wharf towers, we are left for a moment alone, facing the disquieting but extremely fascinating silhoutte in the darkness, with a mild sensation of dizziness. Like the alienated, petrified inhabitants which are mostly depicted in static poses, in contrast to the ever-moving knights, we remain blocked and linger.

Love invades the skyline: Cher Lloyd’sWith Ur Love (2012)

The rebellious mood of the Ill Manors music video and the more suspended atmospheres evoked by Getting Nowhere could be contrasted with the videoclip of With Ur Love (2012 UK version, unknown director; Figure 3). The clip features Cher Lloyd, a swag pop English artist made famous by the talent show The X Factor, singing her hit single with American singer, songwriter and producer Mike Posner. The singer and her two female companions, later followed by a large group of young people, walk through the city, as coloured balloons appear on street corners and slowly rise into the sky. The setting is revealed at the beginning of the first chorus, when at the word ‘flying’, the scene cuts to Posner as he stands on a roof and admires London’s breathtaking skyline, with the city’s high-rise towers (Salesforce Tower, Tower 42, 30 St Mary Axe) and St Paul’s Cathedral in the middle and the incomplete Shard London Bridge on the right. Totally neglecting the thorny, problematic site of Canary Wharf, here the urban skyline reflects the most recent transformations of London, similarly to Ill Manors, but with a completely different mood. Here the skyline is associated with joy, not rage. It feeds aesthetic pleasure, not blame. It provides relaxation, not frustration.

Figure 3.

Screenshots from With Ur Love video clip.

After the first panoramic shot, the video returns to Lloyd walking. The images of Tower 42, with a rapid glimpse of the profile of Salesforce Tower, are followed by aerial views of the dome of St Paul’s and 30 St Mary Axe. During the last two minutes of the video while a group of boys and girls holding balloons follows Lloyd, other balloons fill the entire skyline as Posner, standing on the rooftop, enjoys the lovely view. This video presents the portrait of a landmark city but through the activities of walking and looking from above, which are opposite but complementary tactics that form the cinematic strategy Castro (2010: 145) calls ‘surveying’. The video surveys the City through these techniques. First, Lloyd performs the action of walking on the City’s streets and Posner that of looking from above from a rooftop. Second, Lloyd and Posner engage in two different mise-en-scéne strategies. A close screen frame is almost always used with Lloyd so that the space behind her has no weight. She frequently is in the foreground of the frame in order to attract the viewer with her smile and beauty. Eye-level shots either show what she sees or reveal in what part of the city she walks. Posner performs the action of watching the skyline from above, and even when he looks at the audience and sings, the frame remains open, giving prominence to London in the background. Though Posner is in the foreground, rapid tracking shots insist on focusing on the panorama behind him, moving from left to right to show the audience the view. The shot focus is often deep so that viewers clearly recognise the distinct skyline of London. Lloyd is the sender and Posner the receiver of a message conveyed by the music (hearing) and the colourful balloons (sight), which serve as metaphors for happiness and love. The channel through which the message passes is the very city of London and, in particular, the skyline, which shares the song’s joyful mood.

Among the three, With Ur Love is the video that has received more YouTube visualisations by far. It would be easy to infer that Lloyd’s reassuring, sugary and consumerist portrait of iconic London is the most influential image conveyed to audiences worldwide. However, even in this video, one can appreciate a particular variation on iconic London, through which the skyline deviates from its ‘neoliberal tone’, or business-related image. The ascension of the balloons from the streets to the high-rise blocks under the eyes of the austere City workers communicates a sense of naive re-appropriation of urban space. The straight view of the skyline seems replaced by an emotional filter. The dynamic combination of individuals rhythmically moving across space and a rapid procession of images showing London’s skyline gives rise to an (un)conscious need to re-appropriate space to express diverse feelings, experiences and ways of embodying architectural icons. As seen, videos might depict clearly affirmative or dissenting representations of buildings, but they also document idiosyncratic encounters with places, mixtures of landscapes of power and an intimate involvement with built spaces, and intersections of visual codes with atmospheric and corporeal engagements. At the end, the With Ur Love video is less a celebration of a powerful, dominant global city than a sentimental, fanciful embodiment of London’s urbanscape that provides (guilty?) delight.

Conclusion

In a 1996 Urban Studies article devoted to the ‘entrepreneurial landscapes’ originated by urban redevelopments, Phil Hubbard called for a more nuanced consideration of the orchestration and manipulation of spectacular architecture. He stated that the understanding of those urban landscapes and their representations should move away from a totalising, monolithic view of a dominant urban culture towards a fragmented and grounded notion of individual and social negotiation of urban meanings. Since the meanings of cultural artefacts are not internalised unreflectively, architectural meaning, even that of spectacular architectural forms, is always open to multiple interpretations and contestations. Referring in particular to London, Hubbard noted that ‘one only needs to think of the way in which the glittering towers of Docklands have thrown the growing social and economic polarisations that exist in London’s East End into sharp relief to realise that the careful manipulation of architectural imagery is not always successful in projecting messages of progress for all’ (1996: 1447). Entrepreneurial landscapes are not simply inscribed in an unproblematic fashion, and the ‘variations in attitude’ observed by Hubbard include positive appreciation, resistance, acceptance and compromise. Recalling this early invitation to produce varied interpretations of spectacular architecture, thus avoiding the assumption that artefacts mechanically express the ideology of neoliberalism, this article aimed to discuss the variations of London’s neoliberal skyline as they emerge in music videos. As we have seen, the music videos Ill Manors, Getting Nowhere and With Ur Love provide different interpretations, as well as slippery emotional experiences, of London’s neoliberal iconic buildings. They focus alternately on different sectors of the urban skyline and ascribe varied moods to the arrays of iconic building.

Music videos are not immune from the great influence of urban neoliberalism on powerful media representations of cities and cityscapes. From this perspective, they could be analysed and criticised as coercive audiovisual discourses. However, as Vernallis (2004) aptly suggests, music videos are metaphors of a world where ‘so much about place is contested and in flux’ (2004: 98). Their unique qualities (uncertain and non-linear narrative structure, concise form, fragmented montage, repeated access, discrepancy between sonic and visual content, the ‘vacillation’ of meaning among lyrics, music and image and intense bodily kinaesthetic implications) make them particularly fluid, slippery and unpredictable media through which iconic architecture is performed.

Our readings, necessarily combined with the actual listening/viewing of the video clips, have aimed to convey this sense of fluidity. Although the link between iconic urban landscapes and popular songs has been considered an important factor in the construction of strong place and collective identities (Keeling, 2011), this article focused on music videos with the aim of providing a more nuanced, non-reductionist consideration of the connection between music and places. The sense of being lost in music (and music videos) produces a distance from a sense of identity linked to a place (Negus and Velàzquez, 2002). As argued above, videos might depict clearly affirmative or dissenting representations of iconic buildings, but they also perform ambiguous encounters with places, mixtures of landscapes of power and very different emotional and corporeal involvement with built spaces.

An important aspect that emerged from our city-centred analysis is the dynamisation of the iconic cityscape. Music is movement (Finn, 2011), and in music video clips, landscape images participate in this movement. Since music videos render landscapes ‘partially, quickly, and unpredictably’ (Vernallis, 2004: 92), they emphasise motion within sites and create spatial trajectories, inducing a sense of instability and continual change. Music videos, thus, offer a (mediated) multi-sensual appreciation of architecture, revealing the correlations among architecture, music and movement (Robinson, 2012) in action. They include both views and visual practices, representations and visual experiences, optic and haptic engagements at urban sites.

While reporting the shift in interest from images as representations to images as evocations of urban feelings, and discussing the role of criticism in researching urban affective economy, Rose (2014: 10) states that the challenge ‘is not simply a question of “resisting” the affective’, but instead of ‘multiplying the affective’. Music videos, indeed, provide forms of ‘multiplication’ of urban feelings, and the analysis of the music video may contribute to exploring the refraction and multiplication of the affective dimension of iconic architecture. In the same vein, McCormack (2013: 157) suggests that an experimental strategy to combine the critique of moving images with the openness to their inventiveness and potential to create different inhabitable worlds is ‘juxtaposition’. In this paper we have attempted to provide a juxtaposition of affective mediations of London skyline, throwing into relief different variations on the ‘affective skyline’. These music videos encourage different degrees of critical commentary and political readings, but all of them provide occasions for inhabiting London’s skyline and for being moved by the different affective modulations, registers and energies through which the urban landscape is practiced and constantly and imaginatively remade.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is in memory of Gabriele Zanetto (Ca’ Foscari University, Venice), who was able to bring together economic and cultural geographies with both strictness and gentleness. We are grateful to all the reviewers who commented on previous drafts of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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