This document discusses how music videos can function as powerful rhetoric for celebrity re-branding and transforming pop music. It analyzes Beyoncé's "Formation" and Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off", arguing they disrupted expectations of the artists' brands through their visuals and sounds. The document also discusses how music videos provide opportunities for surprise and shifting discourse through new styles that blend genres in novel ways, as pop culture is increasingly hybridized through technological advances in music production.

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“Shake it Off” or “Get in Formation”: The Music Video’s Function in Celebrity Re-Branding and
Transforming Pop into Powerful Rhetoric
Beyoncé’s surprise release of “Formation” on the night of the 2016 Super Bowl created
an Internet firestorm of discussion.1
Never before had she used the genre of the music video to
make incisive commentary on political issues and the urgent need to celebrate blackness.
People talked and talked (and talked) about “Formation” not just because of its middle finger-
raising, Katrina-referencing afrocentricity, but because Beyoncé disrupted the public’s ideation
of the brand that is Beyoncé. As Althusser, Barthes, Hall, Hebdige, and others have asserted
long before me, people process cultural coding—particularities of speech, dress, accessorizing,
and lifestyle—and ‘universal’, ‘natural,’ and ‘common sense’ in much the same way that they
process filmic coding as ‘reality.’ When pop stars—as recognizable as any household item—
change their style, it changes their message, songwriting and sonic genre-shifting aside.
Hebdige refers to cultural coding as “maps” that we live inside, and that we forget are
constructed: “particular sets of social relations, particular ways of organizing the world appear
to us as if they were universal and timeless”.2
Beyoncé opened a sinkhole in the public’s
expectation of her, resulting in a flurry of memes, parodies, late-night talk show monologues,
and articles. She disorganized the whole world in four minutes of pop transgression.
In an age in which branding is everything, the release of the first single presents itself as
the moment of truth, the pop performer’s most crucial opportunity to shift the rhetoric, to
disturb the dominant discourse. Because, in truth, consumers desire not just predictability, but
also surprise. In Adam Bradley’s scholarship on hip-hop poetics, he explains style as “the sum of
rules and creativity. . .the capacity of particular artists to create new possibilities within the
context of inherited forms.”3
In other words, listeners come to expect a certain type of “sound”:
the unique, complex combination of a performer’s vocal timbre, vocal modulation, rhythmic
style, use of rhyme, speed of lyrical delivery. However, what makes a track interesting is the
manner in which performers create moments of surprise: ‘switching up their flow,’ or as
Bradley puts it, “moments of calculated rhythmic surprise.”4
In a similar manner, the release of
a new album creates an opportunity for developing a ‘new flow,’ and the release of the first
single—always necessarily accompanied by a music video—is the defining moment of surprise.
Hebdige first presents the writing of Jean Genet as a pioneer of cultural studies, reading
his own life, and the objects that matter to him as a different kind of primary text. For Genet, a

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tube of Vaseline, confiscated by the police, inspires Hebdige to consider what he calls “the
subversive implications of style,” expanding upon the notion of clothing, accessories, and
subcultural shared interests as “the idea of style as a form of Refusal.”5
Therein lies the
grounding for my argument that the music videos for both Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off”6
and
Beyoncé’s “Formation” function as powerful feminist texts. “Formation” takes the rhetoric a
step further, also visually speaking out against police brutality and for a meaningful coalescing
of the black community; it is a call to embrace both what Alexander Weheliye refers to as
“sonic blackness” and re-appropriates and embraces visual blackness.7
Taylor Swift, on the
other hand, chooses to “go gaga”, as Jack Halberstam might write, trying on and playing with
multiple modes of being and subcultures, openly and pointedly not fitting into any of them.8
In his analysis of punk as it came into its own in the 1970s, Hebdige characterizes it as an
“unlikely alliance of diverse and superficially incompatible musical traditions.”9
Punk, like all
new forms of sonic production and subgenres, underwent the same process of normalization as
reggae, glam, and every other subculture treated by Hebdige: the slang, clothing, and music
that was read as conflictual, senseless, crass, offensive or just weird in the late 70s has long
since become thoroughly normal, co-opted, cleaned up, and made available to consumers at
large retail outlets. In 2016, the cross-pollination of “diverse and superficially incompatible”
subgenres has reached a level no one could have imagined forty years ago. Thanks to the
breakneck pace of technological advancement, musicians have more tools than ever with which
to sample, mash-up, and collaborate, both remotely and in person. Both Beyoncé and Swift
made pointed departures from stylistic expectations, Beyoncé drawing upon New Orleans
bounce culture in “Formation” and Swift formally abandoning country for late-80s pop in
“Shake it Off,” and the rest of her 2014 album, 1989. Lemonade and 1989 offer a dizzyingly
diverse sonic landscape of hybrid styles, genre-crossing, and collaboration between vastly
different performers, their respective visual album and music videos offering a whirlwind of
aesthetics and visual rhetoric.
Works Cited
1
Beyoncé. “Formation (Explicit).” Online video clip. YouTube, 6 Feb 2016. Web. 27 Apr
2016.
2
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the Meaning of Style. New York: Routledge, 1979. Print. Pg 14
3
Bradley, Adam. Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop. New York: Basic Civitas, 2009.
Print. Pg 124
4
Bradley, Adam. Book of Rhymes. Pg 6
5
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture Pg 2
6
TaylorSwiftVEVO. “Taylor Swift – Shake it Off.” Online video clip. YouTube, 18 Aug 2014. Web.
27 Apr 2016.
7
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke

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UP, 2005. Print.
8
Halberstam, J. Jack. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston: Beacon
Press, 2012. Print. Pg xi
9
Hebdige, Dick. Subculture. Pg 26