Stretching discourses

The quarrel between Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus

This year’s MTV Video Music Awards are dominated by the on stage beef between Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus. After winning an award for Best Hip-Hop video – which seemed quite irrelevant – Minaj started calling out the host of the evening, or Miley Cyrus a.k.a. bitch. Thus Cyrus responded: “We’re all in this industry, we all do interviews, and we all know how they manipulate shit. Nicki, congratu-fucking-lations.”

            Cyrus is referring to (and blaming) the industry as instigator of the quarrel. The question that arises here is whether she is talking about the music industry or media industries in general. According to scholar Jonathan Sterne the music industry doesn’t exist, so that may give rise to some problems. Sterne hereby draws on the work of Christopher Small arguing that “To understand music as an industrial phenomenon goes far beyond those industries directly involved with the sale of recordings” (Sterne 52). Sterne advocates a concept called music industries, which “will allow us to develop more robust and coherent social accounts of music as a media practice” (50). Miley Cyrus – consciously or unconsciously – left out the key word namely music, thus starting this discussion on the discursive boundaries of the industry she’s in.

 The term music industries is only useful if the musical text is decentralized as the basis of music criticism (Sterne 50). A musical text is considered to be all kinds of remediation of a live performance.  Not only is this true for the music industry and the musical text, the same applies to all other media. Krämer and Bredekamp argue that “the ‘textualization’ of culture has reached its limits. By transgressing those boundaries, the concept of culture assumes new contours” (Krämer 24). Thereby providing “a stronger empirical basis for criticizing current institutional arrangements (…)” (Sterne 50).

The two main theoretical approaches in this field of research are considered to be political economy and cultural studies (Fenton 8). “Critical political economy sets out to show how different ways of financing and organising cultural production have traceable consequences for the range of discourses and representations in the public domain (…)” (Fenton 11). Or, as Miley puts it, media institutions and the people that control them have the power to manipulate shit.

Cultural studies on the other hand assume that “conceptions of power have a tendency to be rooted in individual subjectivities , their identities and collective action (…)” (Fenton 8). This notion marks a return to Hall’s encoding/decoding model (Havens 244). Which explains that the meaning of a media message arises from the interpretation of the receiver. In other words, the receiver decodes the message which gives it a certain meaning. In this sense the media didn’t manipulate her, Nicki Minaj simply decoded the aforementioned interview with Miley Cyrus in the New York Times in a negative way.

            Recently scholars accept the benefits of each approach resulting in critical media industries studies. These studies combine critical political economy and cultural studies by arguing that: “(…) audiences do engage in interpretation but that interpretation is subject to the denotative structure of the text. In this manner, ideology remains a crucial reference point(Fenton 18).” Or as stated by Havens et al. “the way in which institutional discourses are internalized and acted upon by cultural workers” (Havens 247).

            Media scholarship is mostly based on discursive analysis. This applies to critical political economy, cultural studies and critical media industries studies. According to Havens et al. cultural studies are focussed on textual discursive analysis and audience reception, but this approach is not sufficient whilst doing critical media industries research. They aim to “recuperate the analysis of discourse, in the Foucauldian sense, as the formation of knowledge (and thus power)” (Havens 247). To do so scholars should frame their research on a helicopter level view, which entails examining the micropolitics of institutional operation and production practices (Havens 238).

            Theoretically this should fill the niche between political economy and cultural studies. Research in this area is easier said than done though. Media nowadays converged into one giant medium, which branches out in many different fields. If we look at the VMA example, we see that media and media industries are all intertwined. Nicki Minaj brings out a song, with that song comes a video, people say stuff about Nicki or the video to the press, this leads to a quarrel on television, because the quarrel is filmed it also lands on youtube or else the internet and so on and so on. One could argue that Nicki Minaj herself is a media industry and the same goes for Miley Cyrus and every other popular personality.

            The fact that one person can behold a whole industry shows that discursive analysis on music industry or any other media industry is impossible, the discourse simply stretches out to much. Scholarship should as stated analyse on stroke of the discourse, but one stroke may still entail too much information. Nicki Minaj can be considered as a branch in the music industry, but as shown above her persona alone unfolded an entire discourse which can be divided in different operations and practices.

            When researching media industries from a critical media industries perspective, using a helicopter level kind of view might still be too broad. This has to with the convergence of media and the fact that media industries under the influence of this convergence are horizontally integrated, meaning that they stretch out to almost every medium available. Consequently, stretching the concerned discourse and creating a huge research field.

Bibliography

Timothy Havens, Aamanda D. Lotz & Serra Tinic (2009), ‘Critical Media Industry Studies: A Research Approach’, in: Communication, Culture & Critique 2, pp. 234-253.

Sybille Krämer & Horst Bredekamp (2013), ‘Culture, Technology, Cultural Techniques – Moving Beyond Text’, in: Theory, Culture & Society 30 (6), pp. 20-29.

Natalie Fenton (2007), ‘Bridging the Mythical Divide: Political Economy and Cultural Studies Approaches to the Analysis of the Media', in: Eoin Devereux (ed.), Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates. London: SAGE, pp. 7-31.

Jonathan Sterne (2014), ‘There Is No Music Industry’, in: Media Industries Journal 1 (1), pp. 50-55.

Thesis statement: Miley Cyrus – obviously smarter than she looks – starts discussion on the discursive analysis within critical media industries studies #Moenander @RU

Initials: 

RO, LO, GK, AL