Visual Culture: What does our reliance on the visual mean?

I subscribe to Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day emails. Today I read an article that briefly examined the lyrics of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” (Last Month in Pop Language: “This Is America” And Other May #1’s). The author Molly Rosen Marriner mentioned that it is difficult to understand the nuanced intentions of the song lyrics without watching the video. While reading Marriner’s article, I began thinking about visual culture and what that means for our society. What does it mean that we cannot understand a song’s lyrics without the visual accompaniment to tell us what it is about?

I study English, and I’ve found it interesting that a lot of my literature classes have at least one video on the syllabus for study and analysis. I love that this teaches how to analyze the implications and the underlying themes and ideas in films, but considering the idea of the visual being imperative to our understanding of the content, where does that leave our abilities of language analysis and critical interpretation?

When asked about my college major, I often get the cliché (and frankly worn-out) “You’re studying English? Why? Don’t you already speak it?” This is where I take a calm breath and state that why yes, I did grow up speaking English and it is, in fact, the only language I speak, but there is much more to understanding a language than just speaking it. In studying the English language, students develop critical thinking skills and methods of analysis that cross over into our daily lives. For example, in analyzing the lyrics to “This is America” as Marriner did, the lyrics are at times vague and lack the expression of intent that the music video offers. While the lyrics are expressive and dynamic with cultural allusions and nuanced images, it seems like a stretch of the imagination to get all of the cultural and historical references that influenced the song without watching the video.

This makes me think of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” a visual album where every song is connected to a portion of the video that adds layers of dimensional meaning to the lyrics. I love “Lemonade” for the culture, beauty of the video, poetry, and lyrical nature of the music, but it brings me back to the idea of visual aids, so to speak, becoming key to our understanding of language. For an entire album from a powerful artist like Beyoncé to be so integrally dependent upon the visual, it makes me wonder: without the innate incorporation of visual culture in today’s media and literature, what would we as a society be missing by not having a visual component? Would we still understand what the artist is trying to express, or would we only understand what is on the surface of the words?