Electropop analysis 3 Kid Cudi vs. Crookers - Day 'n' Night

My third and final analysis video is Day 'n' Night by Kid Cudi. I chose this video because it shows a more prerogative side of electropop music. It shows the fact that the main audience of electropop music 14-30 like something that is upbeat and that they can dance along to. We saw part of this displayed in the video where Nero talks about breaking free. Kid Cudi shows it too in his video by making a narrative where he looses himself in his dreams. The video features Cudi who is acting as a shop worker late at night falling asleep dreaming of his desires (which in particular include women).

Like the videos before it has a short intro explaining the narrative and then the beat/lyrics come in after. In addition, another similarity is that the video tries to be humorous like in the David Guetta video where the old people are dancing. Instead Cudi expresses this humor by having a magical pen that takes woman's clothes of when you press the top. However unlike in the other videos there is no love scene and the video is more focused on having a good time.

Electropop analysis 2 Nero - Promises

The second video I will be analyzing is Promises by Nero. I chose this video because it shows a lot of familiar techniques used in the electropop genre. In the first few seconds of the video for example there is a little intro to the the narrative in the video which is shown without music. This was the same case in the video I talked about previously by David Guetta and Chris Willis. This technique seems to be used a lot in the electropop genre to explain what the video and song is about since most of the video's are narrative based.

Contrasting the video to the lyrics, we can see they are very much connected. In the video Nero talks about breaking free this is shown in the video by the woman who is forced to take tablets to stop her from feeling stops taking them and essentially breaks free from the toxin that is stopping her from feeling. Once again like in the David Guetta video we can see the main focus of the video is on a woman adding the the idea of the male gaze.

However, unlike in the last video we saw Nero takes more of a role in the video. We see her a number of times in the video singing the lyrics. This was unlike the David Guetta video where the singer or Guetta weren't featured much at all and the characters were miming the lyrics. The funky style has although been kept the same with characters wearing big chunky glasses and doing robotic dance moves while in a army kind of building.

Electropop analysis 1 David Guetta - Love is Gone

The first video I have chose to analyse is Love is gone by David Guetta. I chose this video because it has the funky kind of style you expect from a electropop genre. What I mean by this is even though it sticks to some boy/girl love drama you see in most video's it try's to make it humorous by having people do weird things.  For instance, in the video people start dancing in cafe which you would expect to see. But in addition if you look at the types of people dancing it is not just the typically young but also the elderly as well. An example of this is when the old lady starts jumping up and down while playing the drums. The video challenges the modernist idea that everything can be explained by making people do unusual things. For example when the police officers are kissing in public with their hands all over each other. Whereas in real life we would expect police offers to be much more professional about their relationships.


 Another thing I noticed in the video was that the artist does not take a key role in the video. David Guetta is only featured once in the video for a brief second and Chris Willis is not featured at all. Instead the people in the video mime some of the lyrics to look like they are singing it. This is a key concept of most electropop videos and one I will look to include when I make my own video.

Contrasting the video to the lyrics we can see that they have a positive and relationship. What I mean by this is that when Chris Willis says "What are we supposed to do after all that we've been through?" the girl in the video has her hands on her head crying because she doesn't know what to do about the problems she has with her boyfriend. On the other hand though when the chorus "Love is gone" is being sang people are dancing and it shows the clip of the police offers kissing which contrasts the lyrics.

To conclude this video has added to the idea of the male gaze which is a concept created by Laura Mulvey which states that most things we watch are from a heterosexual male's perspective. This video's adds to the male gaze because the prime focus of the video is on a very pretty woman who has just fell out of love with her boyfriend. 

Music Genre Choice Electropop

After a wonderful summer holiday in Canada it's back to media coursework.... fun fun. I have chosen to make a music video out of the electropop genre because I think that people who listen to electropop music tend to ignore music videos because they all look the same and therefore I think it would be interesting to create something different. In addition, I noticed that a lot of other yr13 groups who are making music videos have chose to do indie/alternative bands because it is easier since you can have the video performance based for 50% or more of the video. Whereas in a electropop video all the music is made is the studio which means that if you filmed the video performance based it wouldn't look as effective since music studios are rather plain and doesn't give the same experience as if you were performing to a big crowd. This means that I will be making the video narrative/concept based which is harder because I have to listen to the lyrics and make a story that will follow them for the whole video.

My next step will be to analyse some famous electropop artists and find out what makes their videos so effective that millions of people watch them on sites like youtube. Some artists I have in mind are David Guetta, Nero, Basshunter, DJ Tiesto and Kid Cudi.

Post-Modernism

Post-modernism is wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. Basically instead of thinking that there is a definite answer for everything that can be explained through a certain method it says that nothing can be fully explained and that things will always be changing. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be relative, rather than certain.

With reference to music videos post-modernism is shown through questioning idea's and world pratices.
For instance in the song Diamonds by Kanye West he talks about how people are abusing the human rights of people in Africa by making them work incredibly long hours with little pay to get hold of diamonds (from which the concept blood diamonds arrives). In the video it shows young people in caves and constrasts them to rich people in America who earn their money from the blood money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92FCRmggNqQ (Kanye West- Diamonds youtube link)

Another song of a differnt genre that imports post-modern idea's into the music video is Beautiful by Christina Aguilera. This soulful song is based on a simple concept that basically everyone is beautiful no matter how they look or what their sexuality is. It combats modern thinking by some people that some groups of people like emo's, goth's, gay's and people who stand out are lesser than other people. The video features clips of these groups first looking unhappy and then towards the end looking more confident as the song becomes more upbeat. The message is also very clear in the lyrics "You are beautiful no matter what they say, words can't bring you down. You are beautiful in every single way. Yes. Words can't bring you down. Don't you bring me down today." Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAfyFTzZDMM

Music Video analysis Eminem - Cleanin out my closet

This is a song about Eminem’s childhood with him reflecting on his past experiences. In the song, Eminem introspectively examines his life reflecting on such topics as his troubled childhood, marital conflicts, and resentful feud with his mother. Also in the song, he describes how others protest his lyrics. He expresses the anger that he feels towards his family and how he is better off without them now. This is portrayed in the video using close-ups and making what we see in the video correspond to what he is saying.The video helps the audience to understand how his mother treated him as a child and how it has shaped how he thinks today. 

 

With reference to post modernism, it encourages people to change the way they think about rap music which is often associated with violence , explicit language and women being portrayed in a particulary provactive manner. Instead, the video is more emotional and the woman in the video, Eminem's mother, is portrayed as the anagonist and is not on sexual display.

History of Music Videos

 

 

The first form of music videos came to be in the 1930's, when short films/clips were made based on music. Jazz musician Louis Jordan had short films made for his music which were then put together to create a feature film named 'Lookout Feature'. The video to the song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen was the first proper music video as we know it to be made.

In the 1980's Madonna and Michael Jackson were famed for their use age of music videos as they took inspiration from hit Hollywood films, for example, Madonna's 'Material Girl' which can be linked to 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend' from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, staring Marilyn Monroe.

In 2005, YouTube was launched, making music videos extremely internet-friendly. This also allowed for many many artists to become well known through music videos which had been viewed almost entirely online - for example, rapper Soulja Boy found his succes through this way. Many videos are deemed controversial for their content of sex (such as 50 Cents Candy Shop which showed depictions of intercourse), violence (M.I.A.'s 'Born Free' shows the US military killing kids through ways such as blowing them to pieces), and drug use (Soulwax's 'E Talking' cycles through various club-goers taking drugs).