The Narratives of Music Videos
Michael Shore (1984) argues that music videos are: - Recycled styles
- Surface without substance
- Simulated experience
- Information overload
- Image and style scavengers
- Ambivalence
- Decadence
- Immediate gratification
- Vanity and the moment
- The death of content
- Anesthetization of violence
- Adolescent male fantasies
- Speed, power, girls and wealth
- Album art come to turgid life
- Classical storytelling motifs
Andrew Goodwin (1992) argues that in music video, narrative relations are highly complex and meaning can be created from the individual audio-viewers musical personal musical taste to sophisticated intertextuality that uses multidiscursive phenomena of western culture.
Many music videos are dominated by advertising references, film pastiche and reinforce the postmodern ‘re-use’ tradition.
Sven Carlsson (1999) suggests that music videos in general fall into two rough groups: performance clips and conceptual clips:
- When a music video mostly shows an artist (or artists) singing or dancing, it is a performance clip.
- When the clip shows something else during its duration, often with artistic ambitions, it is a conceptual clip.
Narrative Clip:
A pure narrative clip contains no lip-synchronized singing (micky mousing). A narrative contains a visual story that is easy to follow.
Art Clip:
Pure art clip, no synchronized singing or narrative.
Carlsson (1999) developed a mythical method of analysis of music video – centred on a ‘modern mythic embodiment’.
Viewed from this perspective the music video artist is seen as embodying one, or a combination of ‘modern mythic characters or forces’ of which there are three general. The music video artist is representing different aspects of the free floating disparate universe of music video (no fixed meaning).
In one type of performance, the performer is not a performer anymore, he or she is a materialization of the commercial exhibitionist.
Another type of performance in the music video universe is that of the televised bard. He or she is a modern bard singing lyrics using television as a medium. The televised bard is a singing storyteller who uses actual on-screen images instead of inner, personal images. The greatest televised bards create audio-visual poetry. It can be challenging to make sense of something that doesn’t have sense.
The third type of performer is the electric shaman. Sometimes the shaman is invisible and it is only his or her voice and rhythm that anchor the visuals. He or she often shifts between multiple shapes.
At one moment the electronic Shaman animates dead objects of have a two-dimensional alter egos (as in cartoon comics), seconds later he or she is shifting through time for example David Guetta, people follow him.
