- Perspective on Music Video Analysis
By Sven E Carlsson
i) music videos communicate through TV-screen and TV-speakers
ii) music videos are a form of low-brow popular culture
iii) the reception of music videos depends on the beholder (music video may be beautiful or ugly, art or trash, etc.).
Michael Shore (1984: 98–99) concludes that Music video is
recycled styles … surface without substance … simulated
experience … information overload … image and style scavengers … ambivalence … decadence … immediate gratification … vanity and the moment … image assaults and outré folks … the death of content … anesthetizationof violence thorough chic … adolescent male fantasies … speed, power, girls and wealth … album art come to turgid life … classical storytelling’s motifs … soft-core pornography … clichéd imagery …
Many disparate approaches are possible when music videos are being dissected. One of the most common methods of analysis is to break up the music video into black and white boxes. Almost everything is then perceived as opposites – trash or art, commerce or creativity, male or female, naturalism or antirealism, etc.
When this method is used on music videos in general, videos 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.
Clearly, production of meaning in music videos is complex, compromised of several flows of audio-visual information. These flows interact and the resultant meaning is perceived as one complete whole, created by both the ears and eyes. To illustrate these information flows in a particular moment I use a model of audio-visual analysis that I have developed. The model is a "crude map" which points out how three aspects of the audio-visual flow – music, image, and text – interact producing meaning for "literate" audio-viewers (cf. Chion 1994) of music video. Sound effects are not as common in music video as in ordinary TV-programming, yet when they do appear, they are often are used at the video's beginning or end.
Music video is a form of audio-visual communication in which the meaning is created via carriers of information such as; (1) the music, (2) the lyrics and (3) the moving images.
The Music
The music video is composed by adding images to music.
The music video director creates moving pictures for an already existing tune. A music video lacking a coherent narrative based on visuals and lyrics uses unifying aspects which are a distinctive trait of music. Images are bound together by the beat and other musical features.
Sometimes the musical elements shape of the moving pictures. Movements like footsteps are often synchronized with the beat, so that people in the music video seem to walk in synch to the music.
Melodic phrases can also be visualized by tilting the camera verticality to match the musical phrase's up and down travel on the scales. In Cher’s music video Believe there is a synthesized cymbal-rattle sound which is sometimes synchronized with effects of lightning, and which sometimes amplifies body movements.
The Lyrics
Lyrics and images interact creating meaning.
In many music videos a new meaning is added to the banal lyrics through metaphorical language, often with a amusing twist. When presented well, the concurrence of lyrics and text opens a dimension that an create a poetic experience. The greater the leap between the content of the lyrics and the imagery in this metaphorical joining, the more difficult it becomes for viewers to understand and interpret the context. The opposite of the metaphorical joining of lyrics and images occurs when the illustration to the lyrics are simply illustrated by the visual imagery. For instance, if a dog is mentioned in the lyrics, we see a dog on the TV-screen, if a child is mentioned, we are shown a child. Like a salad of images where the visual story is missing, the story is carried by the music and lyrics and not by an independent visual story.
In the first verse of Cher’s Believe to phrases "I can’t break through" and "so sad" there is a kind of visual echo made by special effects. I interpret this feature as a text-image metaphor. A text-illustration appears for example when the girl sits drinking as the lyrics intone "Sit around and wait for you". Some clichés in the video are quite amusing. For example, Cher has military pants when she is in the third verse when she forcefully repeats "I don’t need you anymore". A standard gimmick in film-making wherein the environment is made to mirror the feelings of the leading characters. The same kind of effects also occurs when the unhappy girl climbs to the rooftop and the rain of tears pours from the sky.
The Image
The visual form is close to the musical form.
To begin the analysis of the image the basic ideas behind the footage must be discerned in order to identify the key concept behind the video. By manipulating color, motive setting, story footage, clothing and so forth, the music video director creates a couple of ideas which are repeated and varied. The concept is to rearrange visual motifs so that the work forms a whole. The concept behind Believe is that Cher is a mystic singer who comments on a girl meeting a boy. The boy rejects the girl, he leaves with another girl.
In the video there are two main visual motifs: one is Cher’s performance track, the other is the narrative track about the unhappy girl. Visual motifs are lightning effects from the discotheque and especially the light that is traveling between the girl and Cher.
Yet the concept does not have to consist of visual motifs: it could be a short silent movie accompanied by background music. A good example of this concept is Bruce Springsteen'sI'm on fire (1986), in which a "grease monkey" falls in love with a female customer. The mechanic drives the customer's car to her house, but he lack the nerve to ring her doorbell and he walks away alone.
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