Forms and Conventions of a Music Video

Music Video Convention's


GENERAL THEORY
Lyrics: establish a general feeling/mood/sense of subject rather than a meaning
Music: tempo often drives the editing
Genre: might be reflected in types of mise-en-scene, themes, performance, camera and editing styles
Camerawork: has an impact on meaning. Movement, angle and shot distance all play a part in the representation of the artist/band (close-ups dominate)
Editing: the most common form is fast-cut montage, rendering many of the images impossible to grasp on first viewing, so ensuring multiple viewing. Often enhancing the editing are digital effects, which play with the original images to offer different kinds of pleasure for the audience.
Intersexuality: not all audiences will spot a reference, which would not significantly detract from their pleasure in the text itself, but greater pleasure might be derived by those who recognise the reference and feel flattered by this. It also increases the audience’s engagement with, and attentiveness to the product. Many music videos draw upon cinema:
Madonna’s Material Girl drew on the song sequence Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend in Howard Hawk’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
2Pac and Dr Dre’s California Love, which referenced George Miller’s Mad Max
Exhibitionism: The apparently more powerful independent female artists of recent years have added to the complexity of the politics of looking and gender/cultural debates, by being at once sexually provocative and apparently in control of, and inviting, a sexualised gaze.

ANDREW GOODWIN’S THEORY
Visuals either illustrate, amplify or contradict the lyrics and music
Genres often have their own music style/iconography
Close-ups should always be included
The artist/band might want to develop their own star iconography, which becomes their star image
Voyeurism is a common theme within music videos
Intertextual references are also popular
Goodwin argues that the female performer is frequently objectified principally for display purposes, often through a combination of camerawork and editing with fragmented body shots emphasising a sexualised treatment of the star.

STEVE ARCHER’S THEORY
There needs to be a strong and coherent relationship between narrative and performance in music promos.
Music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band
A carefully choreographed dance might be part of the artist’s performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualisation and the ‘repeatability’ factor.

JOHN STEWART’S THEORY
The music video has the aesthetics of a TV commercial, with lots of close-ups and lighting being used to focus on the star’s face.
He sees visual reference in music video as coming from a range of sources, although the three most frequent are perhaps cinema, fashion and art photography.
Stewart’s description of the music video as ‘incorporating, raiding and reconstructing’ is essentially the essence of Intersexuality, using something with which the audience may be familiar, to generate both nostalgic associations and new meanings.
The video allows more access to the performer than a stage performance can. The mise-en-scene, in particular, can be used to emphasise an aspirational lifestyle.

SIGMUND FREUD’S THEORY
Refers to the notion that erotic pleasure may be gained by looking at a sexual object (preferably when the object is unaware of being watched)


LAURA MULVEY’S THEORY
Because filmmakers are predominantly male, the presence of women in films is often solely for the purposes of display (rather than for narrative purposes).
The purpose of this displace is to facilitate a voyeuristic response in spectators, which presumes a ‘male gaze’ one that is a powerful controlling gaze at the female on display, who is effectively objectified and passive.