Beginning to look at music videos...

In recent lesson, we have started talking about and studying music videos and we have come up with a list of common conventions that most of them comply to:

• Narrative - the majority of music videos tell some type of story in accordance to the song lyrics. They tend to interpret and convey the feel or themes of the song.
• They have multiple locations and situations.
• There are a lot of sexual images and physical attraction in performance.
• Artificial, non-naturalistic feel - the people starring in the video suddenly burst into song like a classic musical.
• Intertextuality - this can be broken down into 3 different types: Pastiche (copying the style of the original), Parody (mocking the original) and Homage (tribute to the original).
• All of the artists perform to the camera on purpose and break the "4th wall".
• A lot of videos include really fast editing (more commonly known as 'MTV cutting'). Montage editing is anchored by the music.
• Music videos are made for promotional purposes to help raise profit and "shift units" (selling albums and singles etc).
• LIP SYNCHING! It's very rare that music videos don't include any lip synching.
• Synergy in terms of product placement such as films and video games.

Of course, not all music videos follow these conventions (typically indie videos have their own aesthetic and don't follow these conventions), but the majority of them include at least a few of them.
In class, we looked at the music video "Tell Him" by The Exciters from 1962, to see how much these conventions applied to it. Here is what we found:

• The music video is set in a zoo and the artists are singing to a bear, which seemed really strange because it had no relevance to the song.
• Lip-synching is used.
• Classic ending - at the end of the video, the camera pans away from the main action to somewhere else (to a tree in this case). This is quite a cliche for music videos.
• There was choreography involved in the video for the artists to partake in.
• There were several different locations (very conventional).
• The cutting was a lot slower than it would be nowadays because in the 1960's, editing would involve physically cutting and sticking together the different parts of film that had been used.

We also watched the film "A Hard Day's Night" starring The Beatles to see how it influenced the music video. Whilst watching it, we could clearly identify some of the tropes that are included in music videos today. For example, a lot of the songs within the film were shown as if the band were actually performing them live, and this is a common feature of a lot of music videos nowadays. In addition to this, the film celebrates fame, which interlinks with the way in which some music videos seem to boast and have a level of arrogancy alongside their level of fame. We also see a consistent, united image of the band throughout, which is common to music videos of specific genres. For example, in a hip-hop video for a male artist, you would expect to see the artist wearing baggy clothing and lots of jewellery with "scantily-clad" women dancing either around him or in the background. In the case of The Beatles in "A Hard Day's Night", they all had "mop-top" hairstyles and are wearing suits throughout the entire film so as to in-keep with their aesthetic and style.