Transmedia and identity construction in the music industry: the case of the visual album Montero by Lil Nas X
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25029/od.2024.409.25Keywords:
transmedia narrative, visual album, music video, LGTBQ+, Lil Nas XAbstract
Transmediality is a new paradigm of creativity and construction of cultural projects that consists of fragmenting a story's messages or elements of meaning among different media to generate global promotion strategies. The work aims to analyze the visual album Montero, by the American musician Lil Nas X, as a transmedia, artistic, and queer vindication project, with its visual imagination together with some actions in social networks. A cultural and multimodal analysis methodology is used to understand this visual album's intertextuality and cultural quotations. The conclusions point to the generation of leitmotifs around constructing an identity in transformation and a vital experience of rebirth or positive change. The generation of digital and 3D graphics, kitsch aesthetics, Afrofuturism, and visual motifs drawn from the classical symbolic tradition and intertextuality and intermediality define a narrative where lyrics, visual band, and content shared on social networks construct personal storytelling.
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