Neil Fox

Music Films

published in The Wire No.505, London, 2026

Excerpt

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Part of me feels unjust in bemoaning books on music grounded in film historiography. Yet the bewildering audiovision of rock and pop (and their proliferating tentacles of meta-forms) is such a fertile ground for disrupting officiated analyses of cinema as a visual story-telling medium. Music Film tackles this head on, but its analytic prose is neither enlivened nor qualified by sono-musicality. Are publishers and editors to blame for this marooned critical island, where writing on pop music in any context lies beached? Soft-academic books that ‘slum it’ by hammering together sociological, anthropological, ethnographic and political frameworks for musical analysis seem to be restricted from espousing wilder, lateral and defiantly unsubstantiated views—the kind of which past Wire scribes like Kodwo Eshun and Ian Penman excelled in presenting.

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Text © Philip Brophy. Image © BFI Books.