Music Video and Online Social Media: A Case Study of the Discourse Around Japanese Imagery in the New Zealand Indie Scene

Abstract

This article offers original insights into the construction of musical meaning through an intensification and bricolage of postmodern discourse as a result of music video as online media. The discussion contributes to contemporary popular music scholarship by discussing the ‘Stranger People’ video by Doprah, an indie band from Christchurch, New Zealand, with particular focus on Japanese imagery and online social media. The significance of ‘Stranger People’ is that it received a great deal of international attention via social and other media. The article focuses on not only the means of video production, distribution, and consumption, but also the threads of cultural knowledge that are generated through media response to sight and sound and how this creates and re-creates meaning for fans and artists alike. The video serves as a particularly useful case for acknowledging and analysing the extent to which Japanese pop culture has become enmeshed in global cultural flows, and as a site for critical discussion on the localised and creative response to Japanese cultural flows.