The visual album as a hybrid art-form: A case study of traditional, personal, and allusive narratives in Beyoncé

Abstract: The combination of visual art and music has resulted in many innovative audio-visual phenomena and provides an on-going exciting avenue of artistic production. This thesis explores one such phenomenon, the visual album. The visual album is a hybrid medium between music video and film; like music video, it promotes an audio album, and like film, it is conceived as a whole work of art. The visual album borrows formats, techniques and theories from genres, such as direct address and the voyeuristic gaze, and uses them in a hybrid manner. I here define the visual album in terms of formal characteristics and its presentation of visual content, delimit it against other media and place it in a wider visual and music-cultural context. Through a case study of Beyoncé (2013), I then investigate the visual album’s narrative content. Inspired by the contestation of music video’s capacity for narrative, I show that the visual album can contain both classic Hollywood cause-and-effect narrative and personal narrative within individual tracks. These narratives are implemented through the development of characters and their interaction with the artist’s star persona. In the absence of a strong overarching narrative, the visual album creates continuity through the use of visual leitmotifs, which allude to earlier fictional and personal narratives, to the language of narrative, and to narratives outside the visual album. I conclude that the visual album is a new audio-visual genre separate from film and music video, and expresses several different types of narratives. As the first detailed investigation of the visual album, the results of this thesis provide insights to the fields of musicology and visual culture, and enable a deeper understanding of audio-visual phenomena within society’s popular culture.