Music video seems an ideal medium through which to relay political messages, in that they are short enough to be digested without causing boredom, and the messages themselves are often subtle enough to go unnoticed. Many videos have challenged traditional female roles and consequently many academics have written about such videos. Kaplan dedicates much of her book to issues of "Gender Address and The Gaze" (Chapter 5, pp.89-142) and uses such examples as Tina Turner's Private Dancer and What's love Got To Do With It? (both 1984), and Pat Benetar's Love Is a Battlefield (1983). The same examples are quoted in Lisa Lewis' essay "Being Discovered: The emergence of female address on MTV" (from Sound and Vision pp.129-151), and perhaps stress the lack of video clips that tackle the subject (or alternatively, the lack of research on them).

A promo clip common to many books is Madonna's Material Girl (1985), treated differently by each writer but all stating much the same - plenty about the image but little about the music. Again, Kaplan's theories are developed from feminist film theories and she speaks of "videos that have quite conventional narratives, although they do not adhere strictly to Hollywood codes" (p.115). Kaplan uses Madonna's Material Girl as an example because it exemplifies a common rock video phenomenon, namely that of establishing a unique kind of intertextual relationship with a specific Hollywood movie (p.l7), in this case Marilyn Monroe's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Shot-by-shot analysis follows but little is said of the soundtrack, therefore the potential importance of the research is lost in the heavy theorising of visuals and image. Lewis also discusses Material Girl but is more concerned with Madonna's image than her music.

Goodwin is another that refers to Material Girl in his Chapter 5 ("Metanarratives of Stars and identity", pp.98-130), but simplifies the conclusions made complex by previous writers by simplifying the narrative of the visual images, but even he is curiously silent about the music. This suggests that Material Girl may not be the best place to look for issues of gender politics.

Another Madonna clip, Express Yourself (1989) is quoted by Melanie Morton in her essay "Don"t Go For Second Sex, Baby!" from Cathy Swichtenberg's The Madonna Connection (pp.213-235). Again, she compares the video to Hollywood film, this time an earlier film. "Madonna purposefully re-presents and revises both visual and plot fragments from Fritz Lang's 1926 film, Metropolis" (p.213) and its issues of domination and control. She argues that "the movie constantly equates vision with knowledge. Communication is face to face, inscribed or obtained through visual surveillance" (p.222) and that Express Yourself works on a completely different level, in that sound is more important than vision. "The scope of Madonna's critique also includes an intervention into the musical practices that...participate in discursive constructions of domination (p.213).The tone of the song is authoritative, sound and rhythm seem important in David Fincher's visual images of tannoy systems and the physical exercise of the workers, moving to the rhythmic pounding of Shep Pettibone's musical production. Morton sums up the relevance of the music thus - "Turn the sound off and Express Yourself makes no sense because the image track is purposefully constructed incoherently" (p.222). The emphasis has shifted from the visuals of Metropolis to the sounds of Express Yourself, and Morton claims that "Madonna reshapes the art form to tell a different story (p.221) and that "to speak is to exercise power" (p.2l).

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