In today’s
media industry, music videos are an effective way for an artist or director to
get a message across to an audience. Whether this is to promote an idea or the
artist themselves, an array of visual techniques are employed to grab the
audience’s attention and focus it on a specific aspect of the video.
Firstly,
bands often use music videos as a main way of promoting themselves to a wider
audience. New singles are released along with a ‘promo’ video which may use a
visual motif or an exhibition of the artist’s image in order to leave the
audience with a more memorable experience, for example: in the video for
‘Follow Baby’ by the band Peace, their collective image as a band is the at the
forefront of the subject of the video – long hair and leather jackets. Another
example of a music video being a promotional tool is ‘Celestine’ by Spector. In
this video the band are shown to be playing in a desert, with prevalence given
to the members’ look and their ability to play their instruments, which
reinforces their authenticity as musicians. There is no clear narrative
throughout the clip and therefore the video is disjunctional to the song’s
lyrics.
As well as
being a promotional tool, a lot of music videos are used to exploit an artist’s
image, especially if the artist is female. The representation of women in music
videos has become a controversial topic due to the ways in which the artist or
female body is presented in the video. Directors will often use techniques such
as dismemberment of the female body to attract an audience and encourage a
voyeuristic reception of the video, which is also known as Goodwin’s notion of
looking. More specifically, women are frequently represented as sexual objects
in music videos, as the bodily features which are sexually appealing to a
largely male audience are the most predominant aspect of the video. This
concept of presenting women as sexual objects was explored by the critical theorist,
Laura Mulvey, who wrote said that women and the female body are sexualised in
order to promote a product to a predominantly heterosexual male audience. She
also said that in the case of such representation of women, other women are
intended to take a transsexual identification, and view the text from a male
perspective, however Mulvey is often criticised for this disregard for female
viewers to critique female characters or women in media texts.
As well as
being crude and commercial, music videos can also convey a more sincere and
meaningful message. Auteurs such as Johnathan Glazer and Michael Gondry direct
videos which are open to an audience’s interpretation, or instead employ an
interesting aesthetic for the video, for example: Glazer’s video for ‘Rabbit in
Your Headlights’ by UNKLE, and Gondry’s video for ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ by
the White Stripes. Many less commercial artists such as Bjork and Radiohead may
choose to work with auteurs as they want to convey a message which reinforces
their meta-narrative. For example, a lot of Radiohead’s music is about social
alienation, or a certain political comment which they choose to voice. By
working with a certain director, they are able to create a visual experience
which is coherent to the subject matter of their track and often leaves the
audience to have an open interpretation.
In
contemporary society, the rate at which different media texts go in and out of
the public’s interest is astounding. The methods of music videos which I have
discussed also have different effects on the audience to what they once had.
Now, videos which are disjunctional to the music and only serve to promote and
artist are more easily forgotten, and the use of meaningful videos are becoming
more and more popular with widely known artists such as Coldplay and Radiohead.
More and more artists are working with directors in order to create a video
which reinforces their own meta-narrative rather than promoting their image
alone.
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