Dr Stephen Hill 2008

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Textual analysis and interview with Denis Thibaut director of Rock This Party originally published for Routledge Media.

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Original Source: Routledge Media

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Introduction

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Of the many music videos that have been made since the launch of YouTube in 2005 it is perhaps Denis Thibaut’s promotional clip for Bob Sinclar’s ‘Rock This Party’ (2006) that will be remembered as  a landmark production. A parodic anthology of popular music video history, ‘Rock This Party’ captures both the retrospective sensibility of the contemporary music scene and the creative possibilities of recycling. Unlike other key moments in the history of popular music video, ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (1967) by The Beatles for example, or ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (1975) by Queen), ‘Rock This Party’ does not challenge the grammar of music video production. And, indeed, in this direction, OK GO’s infamous self-produced treadmill sequence for ‘Here It Goes Again’ (2006) is far more representative of recent shifts towards a more ‘DIY aesthetic’. Productions such as these foreground the creativity of the individual producer and in many case restate cinematic conventions that can be traced back to silent film and Hollywood musicals: the relationship between sound and image being pivotal to the genealogy of the genre. However, by rejecting the mainstream values of music video, productions aimed at the post-MTV market also serve to reinforce those conventions. As a consequence, understanding the difference between the way in which a multi-million dollar productions makes meaning and a DIY production is often central to the pleasure a YouTube specific music video offers its audience.

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For all its revolutionary potential YouTube has to some extent reinforced the hegemony of dominant media forms. Professionally produced music videos have always been staple part of YouTube content. However, until recently these were usually user generated ‘bootleg’ editions sourced from domestic VHS cassette tapes. Today most major record labels have their own YouTube ‘channels’ streaming digitally re-mastered versions of classic clips alongside latest releases. Most recently EMI America has made 459 videos available by artists as diverse as Billy Idol, The Verve, The Specials, Megadeth, Tina Turner and John Lennon.  Although it has to be said that very often those videos that secure the greatest number of view are not necessarily the authorised versions.  For example, an unofficial version of the video for Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ (1979) ripped from DVD and broadcast on the channel ‘susieretrofuture’ has been watched by three and half million viewers, while the official release on EMI America has been viewed by only three and a half thousand. Nevertheless, it is testimony to YouTube’s influence on the market that record companies have opened their vaults for free public consumption. As its sale to Google in 2006 confirmed, YouTube is now the mainstream of music television.

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Denis Thibaut’s video for ‘Rock This Party’ is an important video because it has a foot in both camps: the mainstream and more specialised knowledge. On the one hand the video is professionally produced on a substantial budget: its glossy look is designed for heavy rotation on MTV and other mainstream channels. On the other hand, it draws heavily upon the kind of cultural archive available on YouTube. Like AllUC, Dailymotion and other sites dominated by user-generated content, the range of footage available on YouTube has made audiences for popular music video more sophisticated than ever before. It is this sophistication that the video for ‘Rock This Party’ draws upon in the construction of meaning. Understanding of the text is contingent upon access to a raft of knowledge about popular music history: knowledge that will enable mastery in the code to decipher the meaning of the video. That said, as Thibaut’s creation implies, audience pleasure with the music video is as much about the generic recognition of audience mimicry as it is about close deconstruction. Before we begin deconstructing the video for Bob Sinclar’s ‘Rock This Party’ is perhaps worth pausing to reflect upon the biography of its creator and the institutional context of the records release.

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Institutions
Bob Sinclar has produced music in a variety of guises since the mid 1990s including The Mighty Bop and Africanism. This more plural sense of identity reflects the reconstructed sensibility of the dance music culture: the infinite versions of the text that exist in endless remixes, re-workings and sample. This duality is prevalent in the release for ‘Rock This Party’. In addition to the explicit sample of C+C’s Everybody Dance the song is credited also to Sinclair’s co-producer Cutee B and vocalists Dollarman, Big Ali and Makedah. In using 15 year old Canadian actor David Beaudoin as the front piece for this contingent alliance Thibuat’s video imposes recognisable brand identity that unifies the track with Sinclair’s preceding releases: Beaudoin starred in the videos for both ‘Love Generation’ (2005) and ‘World Hold On’ (2006). The success of this strategy is evidenced in the songs ability to capitalize on his previous achievements of in the singles chart with ‘Rock This Party’ reaching number 3 in the UK in October 2006. On a global scale the song performed well across all territories. In Europe the song made the top ten in Belgium, The Czeck Republic, Holland, Finland, France, Latvia, Romania and Switzerland. In America the song also made it to number one on the US Dance Chart. While it would be easy to see the international success of ‘Rock This Party’ as a reflection of the globalised nature of record production, the business infrastructure underpinning Sinclar is more modest than his achievements would suggest
 

Like many recording artists today Sinclar is more self-sufficient than his forbears. In part this is reflects the lower cost of music technology. However, it also reflects instability in a music industry focused on short-term profit margins. For Sinclar the success of this strategy is that he owns his own label Yellow Productions: an outfit that has gone on to remixes and produces for artists as diverse as Madonna, Moby and Lionel Ritchie. While such high profile collaborations are usually licensed back to the record label of artist in question, Yellow Productions own releases are usually confined 12-inch singles for club use. As consequence for his own releases the secret of Sinclair’s success has been to license records to bigger labels in other territories. For example, in the UK Yellow Productions have an exclusive deal with Defected Records who release and promote all Sinclar’s material. Likewise in the US Sinclar is licensed to Tommy Boy Records: a label that has its origins in the New York disco scene of the late 70s. 

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This level of specialisation in the career of Bob Sinclars reflect wider moves within the industry towards niche marketing and the targeting of defined communities of consumers: an effect of what Chris Anderson talks about in the The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (2006). In short the combined marketing and distribution possibilities of created by the Internet and other digital technologies have opened up possibilities for the profitability of fringe creative industries. That Bob Sinclar’s career is a tribute to the reconstructed economic landscape of  the Twenty First Century is entirely befitting. Just as the proliferation of the internet disrupted traditional economic models so too has technology underpinning dance music challenged received ideas about authenticity and authorship in popular music. It is appropriate then that Thibaut takes this tension between the real and the simulated as his subject matter for ‘Rock This Party’. To understand this more fully, however, we perhaps need to focus on the representation of performance in the music video as a whole.

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Representations
From a theoretical standpoint the popular music video has long been considered the ultimate example of the post-modern text.  Music video is a depthless world in which musicians lip synch in simulated depictions of musical performance or act out the fragmented narrative elements eluded to in the lyrics.  ‘Rock This Party’ reinforces this idea in the fluid representation of Beaudoin’s identity as he ‘becomes’ different stars at specific points in the music. For example, in the songs opening riff we see him playing air guitar in the guise of Kurt Cobain, and Angus Young from AC/DC. As the beat shifts into a harder r+b style, he then transforms into Justin Timberlake before becoming Bob Marley as the record then takes on a more reggae/calypso feel. This pattern continues throughout the video whereby sonic conventions are indexed to very specific visual codes. In particular the guitar riff is accompanied by depictions of rock performers (Red Hot Chilli Peppers, The Beatles, AC/DC), while the softer more melodic parts are juxtaposed invocations of more traditional r+b/disco performances (Michael Jackson, Saturday Night Fever etc). It is interesting to note, however, that while Bedouin is given license to transgress temporal and racial boundaries, there is no footage of him performing as female. This rejoinder to the dominant structure of the cultural hegemony is reinforced also by the choice of location: an affluent suburb of Montreal. And, indeed, part of the pleasure for the audience is lifestyle aspiration. This is connoted, for example, in the way that the camerawork lingers to focus on details of the house: its capacious garaging, ornate portico and imposing threshold. In this sense the celebration of the incidental material backdrop echoes the visual style of television drama: the largesse of shows like The O.C or Beverley Hills 90210. Of course the subtle codes of avarice are routinely worked into the visual presentation of Hip-Hop and R+B: the celebration of materialism or ‘bling’ that accompanies videos for artists like Jay Z and 50 Cent. And indeed an element in the construction of  ‘Rock This Party’ is of course the rap by Dollarman and Big Ali. However, the significance of the ‘Rock This Party’ lies beyond the representation of sex, race and social class and is in the representation of pop music video history itself. To understand this, however, it is perhaps necessary to understand a little more about the broader contours of popular music video.
 

While some music videos affect a genuine representation of musical performance, this veneer of authenticity conceals the constructed and artificial nature of the representation. Musicianship is often central to this: the presence of guitar, bass and drums serving as motifs for a recordings musical providence. Videos in the rock idiom are particularly prone to rehearse hackneyed depictions: mean and moody men who wield guitars like weapons and lead singers who prostrate themselves heroically against the challenge of getting to the end of the first chorus. The charm of ‘Rock This Party’, however, is it that it does none of this. Working within the dance genre the promo the track is not pre-occupied with fabricating the circumstances of the records production: if it was then the record would focus on the studio exploits of the French DJ and not the fantatastical suburban world of 15 year old David Beaudoin. That is not to say, however, that videos for dance records do not have clichés of their own: the scantily clad, blonde babe is as much a feature of promos for artists like Eric Pridz and Uniting Nations as it is Aerosmith or Guns ‘n’ Roses. However, with records composed entirely of samples there is less pre-occupation with the signification of musical authenticity. For example, videos for early house music records by artists like S-Express and Black Box tended to favour more abstract depictions of club culture in keeping with social activities associated with the music: choreographed dance routines and bright lighting. ‘Rock This Party’, however, is groundbreaking because it dares to take the genre out of this ghetto. In one sense this reflects the notion that Bob Sinclar is very much a ‘second-generation’ pioneer of electronic dance music: his place at the top table is secure alongside other producer-DJ acts like Fat Boy Slim, Moby or Chemical Brothers. However, it is also a product of sample based dance music’s place in pop music history. Twenty years on from the digital revolution of the Eighties, the history of popular music that Sinclair recuperates is very much its own; ‘Rock This Party’ is of course based heavily on C+C Music Factories ‘Gonna Make You Sweat’ (1990), a record itself constructed entirely from samples. The old adage that ‘pop will eat itself ‘ is no longer true: it already has. And this sentiment is explored in Thibaut’s audaciously parodic video clip.

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Forms and Conventions

While Denis Thibaut’s production for ‘Rock This Party’ is a significant music video for the way in which it positions the audience and the complex representations of cultural history, the piece is actually fairly conventional in terms of its technical construction. Indeed, in the opening medium long shot of teenagers arriving at the detached suburban house, the naturalistic mise en scene resembles domestic environs of television drama rather than pop music video. This was deliberate on the part of Thibaut who purposefully wanted to borrow the opening to Paul Brickman’s film Risky Business (1983) starring Tom Cruise:

 

He is alone in his house because his parent are on holiday so he is so happy to be alone he starts to dance in underwear in the living room. (Thibaut 2008).

 

This mimetic quality is central to the forms and conventions of the clip, which derive directly from the history of pop music video. As Thibaud continues:

 

David had a personal dance instructor to learn all the different dances and how to play each artist. He saw a lot of video to see all the different artists (Ibid).

 

For an artists like Sinclair this is extremely significant: in the same way that his record is composed of samples so too is Thibaud’s video made of fragments of other videos. In this sense Beaudoin’s performance is not generic pastiche but instead parodies the conventions of specific videos and performances. This is evidenced by Thibaud’s meticulous attention to detail in the clothing codes deployed throughout the piece: ‘I worked a lot with the stylist to find exactly the same style and outfit for each character’.

 

The shift from Tom Cruise to Kurt Cobain in the opening sequence is connoted by a number of key shifts. At first Beaudoin appears in a bleach blond wig and striped long sleeve t-shirt, which heralds a series of jump cuts in which the same location is drenched in the bright lighting that characterised Samual Bayer’s original video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ (1991). In keeping with this Bedouin’s accomplices, two teenage girls, are reconfigured as the cheerleaders from 1991 promo. This sequence is then integrated into the next set piece via a point of view shot from the perspective of one of the cheerleaders as she opens the door to a bedroom. The camera moves through the door to reveal Beaudoin clad in schoolboy attire upon the bed clutching an electric guitar. The medium long shot cuts back and forth in time with music to a series of medium close ups of Beaudoin. Once again the female pair perform the role of audience members while the bed serves as a make-shift stage for Beaudoin’s burlesque depiction of AC/DC’s Angus Young. The camera then turns at a right angle to reveal the bi-folding doors of a capacious wardrobe; this then parts to reveal a second chamber in which Beaudoin is attired in the garb of Eminem: a white over-sized track-suit, baseball hat and white trainers. The ensemble is accessorised by jewellery including a medallion emblazoned with Bob Sinclar’s name. Once again this is a very specific homage.

 

Fifteen seconds after the shift from AC/DC to Eminem the doors open and close to reveal a medium long shot of Beaudoin and his companies performing as Bob Marley and the Wailers: the wardrobe configured this time not as a studio space but as a portal to another place and time. The footage is not shot in the Caribbean, however, but on location in the house in Montreal: the invocation of Jamaica is contingent upon the palms tress, Beaudoin’s Rastafarian hat and dreadlocks. It is interesting to note that only in this section do the female actors take on the role of female musicians: harmonising in the background while Beaudoin is shot in a variety of mid-shots and close-ups grappling with his guitar.

 

At one minute thirty three the action shifts with a wipe right into the garage: the journey from the bedroom, which is upstairs, to the garage, which is on the ground floor, is connoted but the movement of the camera from a crane shot to a medium shot of a band ‘rehearsing’. Though this movement is accomplished in one take, a jump cut to a mid-shot of the guitarist interrupts the flow; this creates the impression that the camera enters the garage door twice: the disjointed camerawork purposefully reflecting the staccato structure of Sinclar’s composition. In this sequence there is considerable camera movement as Thibault strives to capture the visual style of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s work with the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Once again the mode of reception is precisely indexed to the visual codes of the performance: as Sinclar’s soundtrack returns to the musical riff the teenagers performance is that of the archetypal rock band. Unlike both the AC/DC or Nirvana sequences, Thibaut’s recreation of The Red Hot Chill Pepper’s does not position the female actors as audience members but as musicians: though it is of course telling that they are male as opposed to female performers in this most masculine of genres. That said the codes and conventions of rock are not without their transgressive qualities: long hair, headscarves and the studded dog collar emerge as key visual motifs. It is, however, Beaudoin’s appropriation of lead-singer Anthony Keidis’s tattooed flesh with the words ‘Bob’ and ‘Sinclar’ emblazoned across his back that lends the piece its most recognisably iconic quality.

 

A wipe to left heralds the next scene at one minute fifty, which takes place on the drive outside the detached house. A change in camerawork is immediately evident as the lens resumes its steady focus, this time from a low angle, on the two female actors who now sport more conventional b-girl attire: short sleeve tops, tight pants and baseball caps. While the angle of the shots puts them in an elevated position this is undercut by the synchronised performance of a menial task (washing the car). Their subordinate subject position is reinforced then by the appearance of Beaudoin in the driving seat of the large red convertible. In the next shot the virtual power connoted by the strong colour and largesse of the vehicle offsets the diminutive stature of Beaudoin emphasized by the high angle crane shot. More so than the corn-brades or the sunglasses, Thibaut’s studied recreation of Sean Paul’s is suggested by the specific code of Beaudoin’s body language as he bends down in front of the car and in the loose gesticulation of the arm.  It is interesting to note that in his appropriation of the codes and conventions of a hip-hop star Thibaut’s production is most explicit in its celebration of material: the car, the house and indeed, the girls, are all configured as desirable consumer objects: ‘bling’ to which the audience is invited to aspire.

 

The shift to black and white at two minutes ten is less expected than previous wipes, in part because the scene prior lasts longer at approximately twenty second but also because it is not accompanied by a major shift in the musical soundtrack. Thibaut uses a black and white television as device linking the colour footage shot explicitly on location in Montreal with supposed archive footage of The Beatles, in which Beaudoin plays all four band members. There is it would seem no place for women in the depiction of rock’s most sacred history. Instead the female actors are relegated to the role of audience members screaming hysterically over the musical soundtrack. This diegetic noise prepares the audience for the interruption in the next sequence of Beaudoin’s depiction of Justin Timberlake. At two minutes thirty-four the ringing of a doorbell interrupts the soundtrack. As Beaudoin/Timberlake opens the door an over the shoulder medium shot reveals the unexpected visitor to be none other than Bob Sinclar himself: the forty year French DJ with long brown hair in the role of the angry neighbour asking Beaudoin to ‘shhh’. Thibaut intersperses this diegetic sound with ‘Timberlake’s’ rap, which appears like a response to Sinclar’s request. The repetition of this ‘shhhh’ is followed by a pause in the non-diegetic soundtrack and then momentary silence, as if to highlight the dramatic irony of the DJ’s proceeding appeal: ‘Can you stop this [bleep]ing music please?’. On the beat, the music cuts back into the soundtrack as the door slams, hitting Sinclair on face and the video immediately jumps to the next scene.

 

After this interlude the structure of the song reaches its outro and the backing harmonies are repeated to which previously invocations of Bob Marley and The Beatles have been set. Once again this shift to a more melodic style is symbolised in the visual depiction of less contemporary artists: John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983). Neither Saturday Night Fever or Thriller are of course music videos in the stricktest sense having both been cinema releases originally. However, their presence here reflects their enduring influence upon popular music culture and provides a sense of crescendo to Thibuat’s piece as a whole. As with the more contemporary allusions to Sean Paul and Eminem these references are encoded not only in the very specific clothing conventions but also in the choreographed dance routines depicted. In the final five seconds of the video the editing then carousels its way through a much faster sequence of clips from the preceding shorts: Tom Cruise, Kurt Cobain, AC/DC, Bob Marley, Eminem, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Sean Paul, The Beatles, Justin Timberlake, John Travolta and Michael Jackson. The final shot, however, is a clip of ‘Sean Paul’, not included in the previous sequence, sitting on top of the roof of the house. As the shot moves towards the sky audience is briefly reminded of the leafy suburban surrounding before the video fades to back.

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Audiences

On a very simple level Denis Thibaud production for ‘Rock This Party’ enacts the associated social experience of listening to popular music for the audience. The soundtrack is interrupted in the opening frames by birdsong and the diegetic sound of a stereo being switched on, matched beat perfect to the opening bars of the record. It is telling that the setting is both domestic and suburban: though Sinclair is a club DJ, ‘Rock This Party’ is clearly targeted at a very mainstream audience. This conception of the target audience is reinforced by the choice of lead actor: 15 year old David Beaudoin. And, indeed, in terms of branding Sinclair music is something of a figurehead, having appeared in preceding production for the singles ‘Love Generation’ (2005) and ‘World Hold On’ (2006). However, his routine in ‘Rock This Party’ has considerable appeal to audiences of all ages. According to Thibaud many of the artists Beaudoin as asked to perform were unknown to the Canadian teenager: ‘David, the young guy didn't know nothing about all the artists he had to play, even Michael Jackson!’ That said the video assumes a high level of cultural capital on the part of its audience: the ability to distinguish between the real and the simulated; between the performance of popular music history and that which is being parodied. Indeed part of the pleasure for the audience is the identification of specific artists, genres and performances to which the video pays homage. Though attention has been paid to the detail of each performance including costume, body language and lighting this is clearly not a pastiche. The audience is well aware that temporary abnormal mask the fifteen year old has borrowed is a carnivalesque subterfuge. Identification of these contingent ciphers of popular music history is very much dependent upon access to the archives of popular music video. In part this can be attributed to the proliferation of digital television channels since the end of the Nineties. Increasingly niche marketed, in the UK channels like Kerrang!TV Smash Hits!TV and QTV are multi-platform brand extensions of print based pop coverage aimed at defined communities of consumers cohered specific genres of popular music: alternative rock, teen pop, AOR etc. However, the omnibus quality of ‘Rock This Party’ also draws heavily on audience knowledge acquired from the Internet. Thibaud’s production appeals to a teenage audience that is not only more media literate but one with a more sophisticated understanding of popular music history than ever before. In this sense ‘Rock This Party’ could be said to reflect the sensibility of a generation at ease with the cultural legacy of its forebears. Rebellion does not take the form of outright rejection but rather irreverence in the way that cultural matter is habilitated into the contemporary landscape of popular music culture. The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Bob Marley are not presented as historical figures but timeless icons: fixed signifiers for the way in which popular music might be understood; modes of audience reception which the simplest gesture of costume or body language can invoke.

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Conclusion

In conclusion the factors determining the success Bob Sinclar’s ‘Rock This Party’ and  Denis Thibaut’s promotional video reflects shifts in the way in which popular music  video is conceptualised  in the contemporary music scene.  In the first instance it would seem while YouTube may have initially offered the potential to challenge the convention of the music video genre, in the proliferation of archive footage it has actually re-inscribed the normative conventions. In this respect its greatest legacy has been the access it has given contemporary audiences to popular music history.