The Unruly Archives of Black Music Videos

Midway through Kahlil Joseph's short film Music Is My Mistress (2017), the cellist and singer Kelsey Lu turns to Ishmael Butler, a rapper and member of the hip-hop duo Shabazz Palaces, to ask a question. The dialogue is inaudible, but an intertitle appears on screen: "HER: Who is your favorite film-maker?" "HIM: Miles Davis." This moment of Black audiovisual appreciation anticipates a conversation between Black popular culture scholars Uri McMillan and Mark Anthony Neal that inspires the subtitle for this In Focus dossier: "Music Video as Black Art."¹ McMillan and Neal interpret the complexity of contemporary Black music video production as a "return" to its status as "art"—and specifically as Black art—that self-consciously uses visual and sonic citations from various realms of Black expressive culture including the visual and performing arts, fashion, design, and, obviously, the rich history of Black music and Black music production. McMillan and Neal implicitly refer to an earlier, more recognizable moment in Black music video history, the mid-1990s and early 2000s, when Hype Williams defined music video aesthetics as one of the single most important innovators of the form. Although it is rarely addressed in the literature on music videos, the glare of the prolific filmmaker's influence extends beyond his signature luminous visual style; Williams distinguished the Black music video as a creative laboratory for a new generation of artists such as Arthur Jafa, Kahlil Joseph, Bradford Young, and Jenn Nkiru. As Joseph suggests in Music Is My Mistress, this generation of artists holds the freedom of expression achieved through Black music as an inspiration for formal experimentation in audiovisual media and approaches its filmmaking practice through musical processes, such as improvisation, remixing, looping, and sampling. Often working collaboratively, these artists have taken the music video into the art gallery and bridged the gap between this popular form, art cinema, and installation art. This In Focus is dedicated to these filmmakers and the fluid exchange they have initiated.