Rogers, Holly. 2025. TikTok, YouTube and the Distributed Music Video: The Meta-Mercurial Circulation of Lady Gaga and FKA Twigs. Vibes - The IASPM D-A-CH Series, 4, ISSN 2748-6389 [Article] (Forthcoming)

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Abstract or Description

This article develops the concept of the meta-mercurial to theorise the music video under digital conditions. Moving beyond accounts that treat the video as a bounded artefact, the meta-mercurial frames it as a distributed event, continually reshaped by fan interventions, parasocial activity and platform logics.

The framework distinguishes between closed-circuit recursion and open-circuit dispersal as music videos move through online culture. In the first, proliferations loop back to a shared visual or sonic anchor: Lady Gaga’s “Bloody Mary,” recoded through Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday choreography, exemplifies this mode, its viral afterlife tethered to a recognisable centre. In the second, fragments drift irreversibly into new contexts: FKA Twigs’ “Cellophane” epitomises dispersal, its falsetto chorus repurposed in memes (#misspiggycellophane) and its imagery remixed with AI textures and drag performance. The result is an image-bank and microsong detached from its origin.

These divergent trajectories unsettle established categories in audiovisual scholarship. The text becomes process; authorship disperses into collective recomposition; genre boundaries fracture; originality shifts from singularity to variation. To theorise the meta-mercurial is thus to reposition music video studies at the intersection of film music, pop musicology and industry research. The article proposes methodological tools—version mapping, platform ethnography, and processual reading—to capture this motion, recasting the field as the study of flows rather than fixed texts.

Item Type:	Article
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Music
Dates:	Date Event 8 August 2025 Accepted
Item ID:	39594
Date Deposited:	17 Sep 2025 13:46
Last Modified:	17 Sep 2025 13:46
Peer Reviewed:	Yes, this version has been peer-reviewed.
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39594

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