Jonas Akerlund

Music director research

• Jonas Akerlund is a Swedish music director, and has also directed a few films. His work is best known for being mock forms of short films and movie trailers.

• He has worked with a wide variety of artists, including Madonna, U2, Blink-182, Lady Gaga, Moby, The Rolling Stones and Robbie Williams, among many others.

• The main interesting point about Jonas’ work is that his videos do not tend to follow a particular style. Instead, in every video for every artist there is a very different style and story, a type that effectively works for the video and the artist associated with it.

• Some of his work has been criticized for containing explicit, perhaps inappropriate content for a music video. All criticisms aside, the music videos obviously have an effect on the viewer for many criticisms to be made.

Images from Lady Gaga, Moby and Blink 182 music videos.

• Jonas Akerlund’s style of music video tends to be either dark or quirky, with images considered strange or perhaps disturbing. His work can perhaps be described as postmodern.

• He has also directed 2 films, Spun (2002) and Horsemen (2009.) Both dark in nature, and unrelated in genre and plotlines but linked in editing and character types.

• His work does not follow a particular genre of music. Instead, because he has worked with a wide range of different artists, he is able to explore the many ideas available with working under completely different styles of music, hence none of his videos correspond with each other.

Screenshots of Jonas’ work

The videos featured are – Jennifer Lopez Maroon 5

Madonna James Blunt