Stephanie is a PhD candidate Fine Arts, with an emphasis in Musicology at Texas Tech University. Her research is broadly defined by issues of reception, perception, and social and political contexts. She has presented research on popular reception of Soviet compositions in Cold War America at multiple international conferences and is an active performer of Balkan music and of Medieval and Renaissance music. Her dissertation focuses on the shifting societal role of the rebec in the early Renaissance. She is also interested in visual culture and the interpretation of the “Medieval” in popular culture. 

Medieval and Renaissance Bodies in Mark Stoermer’s “Blood and Guts”: An Historical 

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Stephanie Rizvi-Stewart

In 2016, Mark Stoermer, bassist for The Killers, released his second solo album, entitled Dark Arts. This album explored his childhood influences including Pink Floyd and the Beatles. In conjunction with the album, he released several music videos, most of which featured a heavy dose of psychedelic imagery to accompany his musical influences. Perhaps the most striking of these is the music video for “Blood and Guts (The Anatomy Lesson).” The video is a mesmerizing – and at times disorienting – stream of psychedelic imagery and tableaux. While much of the imagery has its roots in 20th century art and music, it also has a heavy dose of the pre-modern, which is suitable given that the song was inspired by a Rembrandt painting. Much of this imagery centers on events occurring in a church, some of which could be viewed as sacrilegious and NSFW. However, when considered in the context of Medieval and Renaissance historical realities, artistic tendencies, and ideas about Christian mysticism and the human body, the images in Stoermer’s video take on a rather different meaning. This paper will show that the visual imagery of “Blood and Guts” has cultural and historical precedent in premodern history when viewed unfiltered through the lenses of Puritan and Victorian morality. I will accomplish this through the juxtaposition of the historical with the medievalism displayed in the “Blood and Guts” music video. While this may seem like an historical stretch, I suggest that such a perspective has the potential to provide new facets through which to form ideas and understandings of contemporary imagery that might not otherwise be apparent, and perhaps reveal the ways we as scholars still filter our conclusions through a Puritan or Victorian lens when examining modern depictions of human bodies. 

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Keywords: Medievalism, Music Videos, Visual culture 

Video presentation