Henry Jenkins “Layers of Meaning”: Fan Music Video and the Poetics of Poaching (1993)
Henry Jenkins analysed fan music videos in 1993 as a cultural phenomenon and comes to the conclusion that it is: “[…] rather, a unique form [of art], ideally suited to demands of fan culture, depending for its significance upon the careful welding of words and images to comment on the series narrative.” He reflects on the transition of the original towards the new meaning, which is achieved by rearranging different footage and by adding songs to those newly created sequences. Jenkins says that there are different aims of those videos: they either want to critique, parody aspects of the original series, shift the focus from the “series privileged male leads onto secondary characters” or create new meaning.
Jenkins also writes about the audience of fan music videos. There is on the one hand the fan community of a series and on the other hand ordinary people who have not been in touch with that special series or only know little about it. For that reason he distinguishes between two kinds of videos: “[…] convention videos, which need to be broadly drawn to allow immediate recognition from a wide range of fans, and “living-room videos”, made for a more select and analytic audience familiar with the community’s interpretive conventions.”
At one point he compares MTV music videos with fan music videos, as in both formats the music is the most evident. But he comes to the conclusion that they are quite different, as in MTV music videos images are not used to tell a story, but rather to center the concentration towards the singer, whereas in fan music videos the narrative structure is the most important part. The music only helps emerging the meaning they want to create, so that it doesn’t matter at all who actually sings the song they use.
What I find the most interesting about Jenkins work is, that he wrote it in 1993 but that it still applies to todays culture of rearranging things together and sharing the outcome with a broad range of audience. One big change that has taken place is that today it is much easier to create such a video and to make it public as there are formats like youtube.
But there is one point I don’t completely agree with Jenkins. It is the point about MTV music videos. There are still videos today without a narrative structure, but more and more videos tell a story and move away from the glorification of the singer.
For the general research about Remix culture this aspect was very interesting and useful, but for my special Research question about Shakespeare it is not really helpful, as it goes in a completely different direction in comparison to what I intend on researching about.
