Visual Albums: Merging Music, Lyric and Images
The release of Beyonce's visual album Lemonade broke the internets - apparently. I'm a big fan of Bey and I do think she hit it out of the park with 'Formation'. But with all the hype about it being a visual album, I started wondering how the heck it differed from video (which, apparently, killed the radio star).
Well, the visual album amounted to all 12 tracks on the album being released along with a 60 minute film. Which, in terms of narrative, goes beyond the 4-5 minute music video track. The length of the video tells us a few interesting things, some of which are:
- Life is not a series of soundbites
- Events lead to other events: cause meets immediate and long terms effects (and casts quite a few ripples too)
- Stories are not linear - there are digressions and tangents, dreams and hopes, imagined and real memories
Lets face it, many older albums - the ones we used to buy on vinyl - have pioneered the visual album. A quick look at any number of David Bowie, Pink Floyd and Kate Bush albums replete with booklet inserts covered in artist-led/inspired artwork that intersected with the music content will tell you that. But the world in which we are living has been irrevocably changed by the way in which we consume media and which media is most popular - and the most popular form of media is film/video.
And so, the visual album comes to represent both a metaphor for life as well as a very interesting development in popular music. Visual albums restore complexity to and respect the complexity of life. It is a simultaneous evolutionary move which acknowledges our big, big world and the amount of knowledge the average person has in their mind/body/soul over a lifetime. After all, in the early 1900's, the average individual died with the amount of knowledge that - if written down - would fill a fairly thick New York Times newspaper (you know, when newspapers were still thick in the 1990's with multiple sections). These days, the amount of knowledge acquired by an average person over the course of their lifetime is closer to a few volumes of the old fashioned Encyclopaedia Brittanica - and we are all the better for it!
Lately, I've been doing performance pieces in caves to groups of 25 - 75 people (depending on the cave). What a buzz it is to be surrounded by extraordinary calcite crystal speleothems of many colours and the bluest water courses against the backdrop of spectacular caverns, passages and chambers! The bigger work I'm developing is based on my newly discovered love of caves and the time honoured conception of caves as being a portal to worlds beyond.
Enter 'Rock, The Musical'.
The journey through the caves in the plot I'm developing is a visual treat in and of itself and I'd like to share it with you! In case you're wondering what the little orbs are, they're oolites or 'cave pearls'. Here's a visual verbal snippet from Act I about a developing love affair between two characters:
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I agree with Michael. VR is making leaps and bounds. With the internet, it is readily available at out fingertips.
It is amazing how much information we are being bombarded with and the move towards a more visual world....VR will be the way to communicate everything in the future which isn't that far away!
Yes! Cannot wait for VR to create new, interesting fusions between different artforms and in the real world - as an example, I think community mental health treatment could be revolutionised.
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I am now singing 'video killed the radio star' lol :)