What does contemporary scholarship on the music video have to offer? The heyday of the purely televisual, MTV-style clip has long passed. Its once explicitly commercial imperative and well-defined aesthetic boundaries are now routinely changed and challenged by the emergent audiovisual economies of the internet. Discourses of art-vs.-commerce and authenticity-vs.-artifice have already been rehearsed and rehashed. Artists such as Björk, Radiohead and Brian Eno have begun to turn their respective attentions towards new audiovisual pastures, finding artistic outlet in the haptic interactivity of modern smartphone technologies and the immersive worlds of virtual and augmented reality.

For the editors of Music/Video, the answers to this question are multiple, intersecting and – frustratingly – only occasionally stated precisely. In their introduction to this new 17 chapter volume, for instance, they suggest that the cultural complexity of the form ‘has only become fully describable in the contemporary period’ (p. 13). New modes of production, dissemination and access have served to ‘destabilise what we thought we knew about music video’ (p. 2), technology bringing with it a fresh critical vantage point. It's a valid observation, and one which some chapters, such as that by Sunil Manghani, certainly pursue in detail. Making rhetorical moves redolent of Henry Jenkins and Lawrence Lessig, Manghani argues that the democratising bent of the world wide web – and the establishment of infinite archival resources such as YouTube – has encouraged audiences to approach older music videos with a new, productive intent: sharing, editing, remixing. Yet at the same time, any suggestion that this volume engages with ideas of excavation and resurrection is also undermined by the fact that many of its 17 chapters draw on decidedly contemporary videos (FKA twigs; Nicki Minaj; Psy's inimitable ‘Gangnam Style’).

Elsewhere in their introduction, the editors likewise suggest that changing modes of production necessitate a more constructivist approach to music video scholarship: ‘the music video of its first period’, they argue, ‘belongs just as much to a forgotten technical and aesthetic world, even if it is a world that has strongly conditioned contemporary digital aesthetics’ (p. 3). They cite Sean Cubitt as a ‘useful corrective to representationalist approaches to music video’ (p. 2), but then, their collection also includes a four-chapter section that takes an explicitly representationalist approach: Vera Brozzoni explores the deft and nuanced exploration of love and eroticism of Björk's audiovisual oeuvre; Kirsty Fairclough provides an assessment of FKA twigs’ audiovisual critiques of issues such as rape, empowerment and self-expression. In a similar vein, the suggestion that digital technologies necessitate a broader conception of the music video (p. 2) is undermined by the fact that the vast majority of these chapters analyse audiovisual texts that are quintessential examples of the form. David Bowie, Björk and New Order, as well as those more recent entries to the canon mentioned above, are all well represented here. The occasional exception – Michael Saffle's chapter on the Disney television show Phineas and Ferb, for instance – seem oddly placed as a consequence.

To identify these contradictions is not to say that the work contained within this volume is not valuable or interesting; rather it is simply to bemoan the fact that is framed in a way that is, at best, hazy, or at worst, misleads its reader into approaching each chapter with a set of false expectations. There is certainly insightful research to be found throughout Music/Video. The aforementioned chapters on gender representation deal admirably with the notion of the music video as a site for the contestation of hegemonic gender norms. Gina Arnold presents a fascinating reading of Psy's ‘Gangnam Style’ as emblematic of both the transnational flows of the boundless global internet and the dominance of the Asian economies within the global marketplace. Daniel Cookney draws on ethnographic data to explore the motivations driving the production of unofficial fan videos – in this case, those accompanying the music of electronic producer Burial. Sarie Mairs Slee makes an elegant case that music video is not just a coupling of sound and vision, but, very frequently, a tripartite confluence of sound, the moving image and dance. In a similar vein, and through a study of industrial music videos, Michael Goddard argues for an understanding of music video not as a combinatory medium, but as a synthesis: something greater than the sum of its parts; an ‘audiovision’. Through an analysis of three key videos, Julie Lobalzo Wright explores the way David Bowie utilised the medium in order to establish and maintain his ‘star persona’. Greg de Cuir Jr suggests that Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's ‘The Message’ (1982) can be understood as an hip-hop urtext, vestiges of whose legacy can be found in later videos by Ice Cube and Puff Daddy. The volume promises to be a rewarding read for those with interests in music video, music and audiovisual media more generally or the individual artists and genres specifically addressed in each chapter.

Music/Video is a lively and, perhaps above all else, far-reaching contribution to the body of literature on music video. The joy of such a diverse collection is, of course, that the juxtaposition of its varied contents might encourage a fortuitous cross-pollination of ideas. However, any unpredictable firing of synapses is partly foreclosed by the editors’ attempts to unify the diverse contents of their volume by contextualising it with a loose collection of themes and through-lines, which ultimately only partially represents the material it contains. Nevertheless, this gripe is not to condemn the collection as a whole; it remains an insightful and worthwhile read for scholars working at the intersection of music and audiovisual media.