Research Task 1 - Textual Analysis of 4 Music Videos

In the music video ‘High School Never Ends’ by ‘Bowling For Soup’ they follow normal conventions of rock music videos. A typical convention is to have a mainly performance based video, in the video ‘high school never ends’ it is ¾ performance based and only ¼ narrative based. In this video there are a lot of inter-textual references this is shown when they kept talking about celebrities e.g. ‘Bill Gates captain of the chess team’ and ‘Jack Black the clown’. This video has a relationship between the lyrics and visuals this is because they are at a school reunion and they are singing about how ‘High School Never Ends. Also the relationship is formed because they have flashbacks of when they were bullied in school. There are close ups of the band members and a star image motif is created. One star image is the weigh of the guitarist – this star image motif is created because there are close ups of his weight in both the performance and the flashbacks. The video of this song is below.

In the video ‘Somewhere Only We Know’ by ‘Keane’ it follows some of the genre characteristics. This is because it is largely performance based. However this video also has some concept based and narrative based parts, this makes the relationship between the lyrics and visuals very clear and easy to understand. The main times when close ups are used is during the performance parts of the video. This could be to show their audience that they are mainly concerned about their playing – this is conventional of this type of music. The music video for 'Somewhere Only We Know' is below.

 

In the video ‘Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F)’ by ‘Katy Perry’ there are a lot of inter-textual references this is because there are other singers in the video for example: Rebecca Black, there are also actors in the video from Glee. The fact that these people are in this video could be because of their target audience. There is also a lot of notion of looking in this video – this is because both sexes are sexualized.  There is a strong relationship between the lyrics and the visuals this is because most of the lyrics talks about an amazing party which happened and the video was showing this party.  There are many close ups of Katy Perry which creates a star image – this video shows her transformation of being ugly to pretty and then back to being ugly. This video follows a lot of genre characteristics for this sort of music. The music video for this song is below.

In the video ‘Somebody Like You’ by ‘Keith Urban’ it is mostly performance based but parts of it is also narrative based. There are close ups used while he is performing this could be to make his audience realize the love which he has for his music. There is a relationship between the music and the visuals. This is because he is a country singer and the visuals shows typical ‘country folk’ because they are wearing cowboy hats and they location also represents the country. There are a couple of examples of notion of looking – this is of the main girl in the video – there are close ups of her and some extreme close ups which create the notion of looking. This video is beow.