From style to form: the iteration of popular music culture in contemporary Hollywood musicals

Abstract

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed the resurgence of film musicals. The surge of remakes, jukebox musicals, and musical biopics not only reflects the genre’s retrospection of its own history but also shows how popular music culture has been siphoned into the genre’s creative corpus. This thesis addresses the intersection between the shifting topography of popular music and film musicals, their mutual influences on each other, and the audiovisual aesthetic innovations that arise from this collision. By investigating the evolving discourse of popular music, the transformation of songs across different media formats and cultural forms, and the recycling of pre-existing songs and popular music culture in contemporary Hollywood musicals, I argue that the styles and forms of popular music and film musicals have, to some extent, merged and grew into inseparable parts of each other. From the perspective of film musicals, the highly structured art form of popular music and its inclusive discourse provide abundant sources for film creation. Subgenres like jukebox musicals leverage the bivalence of popular music – as an art form and a commodity form – and reinvent it as a narrative device, bringing new orders to the dichotomy of numbers and the narrative. From the perspective of popular music, whose aural experience constantly longs for the ‘absent’ visual component of a music performance, the cultural form of film musicals offers ways of visualisation and dramatisation for songs, whether on stage or in celluloid format. Therefore, the audiovisual forms found in film musicals have also subtly influenced the style and creation of popular music, especially in practices like concept albums. Considering the analyses of images’ relationship to the music, my research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing genre studies concerning film musicals and discussions on the various discourses surrounding popular music. It also engages discussions on media formats, music stardom, authenticity, nostalgia, and postmodern aesthetics, all of which are pertinent to popular culture. The case studies include A Star Is Born (1954, 1976, 2018), Evita (1996), Across the Universe (2007), and Moulin Rouge! (2001), which are most considered contemporary and postmodern texts. They are exemplary as they may represent the continuity of the semantic/syntactic framework established in Altman’s taxonomy while revealing how the genre transcends its own audiovisual conventions and achieves aesthetic innovations.

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ORCID for Kevin Donnelly: orcid.org/0009-0006-5087-4701

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