How do fanmade music videos feature technique, virtuosity, and in-group community building? Andrew Malilay White will give a paper that answers these questions at the joint conference of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in November. In short, fanmade videos for the song “Bad Apple!!” by Masayoshi Minoshima all celebrate technical ability while mingling in-group and out-group knowledge. On one hand, video creators revel in a niche shared interest, but on the other hand, they make a point of exploring video techniques that only a fraction of in-group fans would be able to recreate, let alone understand.

What happens when visual technique eclipses the content of a music video? This paper analyzes virtuosic video remixes of the Japanese pop song “Bad Apple!!”. Since 2008, video creators have made increasingly complex recreations of a fanmade music video for this song: one of the most viewed recreations was made of a stop-motion animation using thousands of actual carved apples. I view these remixes through the anthropological lens developed by Alfred Gell (1992, 1998). Gell writes that artistic technique produces effects that are crucially culture-bound—in his words, “un-redeemably ethnocentric” (1992, 40). This paper adds to a critical musical literature on Gell’s theory, which has been applied in the realms of eighteenth-century vocal performance (Feldman 2007) and music notation (Schuiling 2019).