Today’s News from the University of Kansas
Headlines
Sound and vision: MTV ‘Buzz Clip’ analysis reveals associations
LAWRENCE – In the heyday of music videos, cross-dressing was white, and baldness was Black. Guitars were associated with men, while drum machines were paired with women. Those are among the findings of an analysis of all of MTV’s “Buzz Clips” from the 1990s, reported on in a research paper recently published by Brad Osborn, University of Kansas associate professor of music, in the journal Music & Science.
Study shows contact with criminal justice system affects well-being — with consequences at the polls
LAWRENCE — When police in Aurora, Colorado, handcuffed children and made them lie face down on the pavement after stopping an African-American family they mistakenly identified, they not only made headlines, they prompted city officials to apologize for the officers’ behavior and offer to pay for therapy for the traumatized children. When officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake in front of his children, the resulting protests and unrest grabbed more headlines than the effects of the situation on the children. A University of Kansas scholar has written a study connecting carceral contact, feelings of well-being and how a predacious criminal justice policy decreases political participation in certain communities.
Full stories below.
————————————————————————
Contact: Rick Hellman, KU News Service, 785-864-8852, [email protected], @RickHellman
Sound and vision: MTV ‘Buzz Clip’ analysis reveals associations
LAWRENCE – In the heyday of music videos, cross-dressing was white, and baldness was Black. Guitars were associated with men, while drum machines were paired with women.
Those are among the findings of an analysis of all of MTV’s “Buzz Clips” from the 1990s, reported on in a research paper recently published by Brad Osborn, University of Kansas associate professor of music. The article in the journal Music & Science, titled “Content and Correlational Analysis of a Corpus of MTV-Promoted Music Videos Aired Between 1990 and 1999,” was written by Osborn and two former KU doctoral students in music education, Emily Glaser Rossin and Kevin Weingarten.
Osborn said that the idea for the research paper occurred to him several years ago after he gave a talk at a conference on using videos to teach music theory.
“I’m such a child of the ’90s, and I realized that all the videos in my talk were ‘Buzz Clips’ I remembered as a kid,” Osborn said. “I thought: ‘How can I make a serious project out of this?’”
The first step was to compile a list of all of MTV’s “Buzzworthy” videos in the 1990s, which was harder than it might sound. Osborn said he had to make extensive use of the saved MTV web pages in the Internet Archive, or Wayback Machine, to try to find information MTV had allowed to disappear from its website in the meanwhile. In the end, Osborn said, only five ’90s “Buzz Clips” could not be located someplace on the internet today.
Osborn and the students analyzed the clips to mark down significant features that jumped out at them – things like black or leather clothing, an instrumental solo, an ocean or river setting, etc. They compiled a list of those references into a database and watched the videos again, noting other things going on in the video that were associated with the noted items. These correlations were compiled into a table of “Buzz Clip” tropes.
“Our analysis sets out to assess the kinds of people and cultural practices MTV promoted as buzzworthy in the 1990s,” the authors wrote. “We interpret a number of these relationships in terms of their relevance to a performer’s perceived ethnicity and gender, showing how certain audiovisual features regularly accompany white men (e.g., electric guitar) while others regularly accompany women and performers of color (e.g., drum machines).” This suggests to the viewer, the authors wrote, that “the electric guitar, the most identifiable signifier of rock music, is associated with white men. By contrast, the drum machine, an instrument that is virtually anathema to rock ‘authenticity’ in the ’90s, correlates strongly with musicians of color, keyboards and choreographed dancing regularly seen in hip-hop and R&B videos.”
Other relationships noted in the analysis include that “(m)usic videos with dream sequences correlate negatively with videos that contain police or military imagery, suggesting that these topics were too ‘serious’ to be depicted through dreams. They correlate positively with videos than contain well-formed narrative stories …” The authors slice and dice these relationships in various ways and diagrams, seeking to extract meaning from the juxtapositions.
In retrospect, Osborn said, “One big thing I learned was how important music videos were for fashion in the 1990s. If you watch them chronologically, you can see the fashions change.”
Of course, things have continued to change in the intervening decades of the 21st century. Osborn noted the paucity of instrumental solos – much less guitar solos — and introductory passages in today’s popular songs and videos.
“It’s part of that notion of ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus,’” Osborn said. “I watched the MTV Awards show a couple of nights ago, and what they call alternative rock is now all made with drum machines.”
As Osborn and his co-authors wrote, “It is hard to overstate the sonic importance of the electric guitar and drum machines in determining rock and hip-hop genres (respectively). While the latter has remained a dominant sound in the Billboard Hot 100 hits of today, the electric guitar has largely been replaced by synthesizers as a primary chording instrument. As such, it is possible that the sound of a (distorted) electric guitar playing (power) chords might signify a ‘throwback’ 90s sound.”
——————————————————————
The official university Twitter account has changed to @UnivOfKansas.
Refollow @KUNews for KU News Service stories, discoveries and experts.
————————————————————————
Contact: Mike Krings, KU News Service, 785-864-8860, [email protected], @MikeKrings
Study shows contact with criminal justice system affects well-being — with consequences at the polls
LAWRENCE — When police in Aurora, Colorado, handcuffed children and made them lie face down on the pavement after stopping an African-American family they mistakenly identified, they not only made headlines, they prompted city officials to apologize for the officers’ behavior and offer to pay for therapy for the traumatized children. When officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot Jacob Blake in front of his children, the resulting protests and unrest grabbed more headlines than the effects of the situation on the children. A University of Kansas scholar has written a study connecting carceral contact, feelings of well-being and how a predacious criminal justice policy decreases political participation in certain communities.
Brandon Davis, assistant professor of public affairs & administration at KU, wrote a study published in Policy Studies Journal examining survey data from thousands of young people across the country about their contact with the criminal justice system, their well-being and how politically active they were. Among the findings, he found feelings of well-being are strongly connected to political participation and that carceral contact negatively affected feelings of well-being.
“That was a critical, prime example of how families learn about their role in the community and how law enforcement interacts with them, and traumatic incidents like that will have a lasting effect on their feelings of well-being,” Davis said of the Aurora incident in which officers handcuffed children as young as 6. “That has an interpretive feedback effect on the community as well beyond the people who were handcuffed. These incidents are happening across the country and have a lasting effect on political participation.”
For the study, Davis analyzed data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a data set that surveys nearly 9,000 Americans born between 1980 and 1984. Political participation was measured in terms of being registered to vote, interest in politics and voting history.
Depression was the strongest predictor across levels of participation, and those who experienced it were least likely to take part in any of the measures of political participation. Feelings of sadness or anxiety also had negative associations with participation. In terms of well-being, those who reported the highest levels of happiness were the most likely to be politically active in all measures.
The data also showed that respondents who had the most carceral contact, whether it was being incarcerated or something as simple as being stopped by the police for a traffic violation, reported the lowest levels of well-being, which in turn indicated they were less likely to be politically active. Davis pointed out African-American respondents were most likely to report feelings of depression and anxiety, followed by Hispanics, then whites, following the pattern of people of color being disproportionately affected by policing, incarceration and criminal justice policy.
Research has long found that people of color are more likely to be negatively affected by the criminal justice system, but it has rarely examined how it is happening and its ties to political participation. That link is vital in order to combat the problem and help boost voting and political participation among minority communities, Davis said.
“The question of how this is happening is important because if you want to fix it, you can’t do that if you don’t know the mechanisms that it is working through,” he said.
Furthermore, understanding which specific policies have negative effects on individual and community well-being and how they discourage political participation are necessary if advocates, scholars and lawmakers hope to craft better policy that is equitable and encourages equal participation, Davis said.
Carceral contact can decrease participation beyond the individuals dealing with the justice system as well. In previous research, Davis found that carceral contact decreases participation for individuals who have a family member incarcerated even more than it does for the individual.
Such negative interactions are passed through family generations and through a community, which leads to communities not being truly represented by their government. A 2016 Department of Justice report on the City of Baltimore’s Police Department revealed vastly unequal policing measures taken against minority citizens, which prompted Davis to begin his research in carceral contact and political participation. Among other findings, the report showed citizens of color were commonly subjected to public strip searches for minor offenses.
“It made me think about what that would do to your well-being if you didn’t know when you left your house if someone would strip you naked in the street for something as minor as what are essentially misdemeanors of poverty, like having a broken taillight,” Davis said.
Perhaps most importantly, the current study shows how public policy affects political behavior. By illustrating the connection between carceral contact, well-being and political participation, Davis said he hopes researchers will further study other forms of institutional contact and how they inhibit participation as well. With further study, it can be better understood how poor and people of color are excluded from political participation via public policy, which can then lead to addressing those causal mechanisms through public policy reform.
————————————————————————
KU News Service
1450 Jayhawk Blvd.
Lawrence KS 66045
Phone: 785-864-3256
Fax: 785-864-3339
Erinn Barcomb-Peterson, director of news and media relations, [email protected]
Today’s News is a free service from the Office of Public Affairs
From the Office of Public Affairs | http://www.news.ku.edu
