Goodwin's Theory of music videos

Andrew Goodwin was an Australian born operatic tenor, he had written a book called, "Dancing in the distraction factory: Music television and Popular Culture" within this book he has a theory of music videos and their connections with the lyrics. In the book he states six different techniques that are used to make the video and song seem much better and to also make it visually appealing to us the audience.

Three of these main techniques consist on how the music video relates to the lyrics or what's going on the video and how the audience see it. When doing this I will analyse what this does and how it benefits the viewer.



Illustrating
The first of these three techniques I am going to talk about will be illustrating within the music video, this is basically when the mood and the lyrics match exactly what's going on visually in the music video. A good example to show you this would be "Payphone - Maroon 5" within this video we can see that the technique has been used in a narrative form, which is to tell a story within the music video, we can see this straight away within the music video, where the artist says at "0:20" "I'm at a payphone trying to call home" from the visual aspect of the music video we can see that this lyric is being lip sync and also the artist is at a payphone. What this does is make the audience have a better understanding of the lyrics and the music video. From this we can see that Goodwin's theory about illustrating within the music video and the lyrics connecting is true, when we see it in the music video I provided as an example.

Amplifying

With this technique the artist try's to give the audience a sense of emotion and mood from the music video, for example I used " Homecoming - Kanye West " the reason for choosing this video is because it shows the amplification of him coming home and him walking around his home town. The video is in a grey scale to show us the dullness of the town and the emotion he is in when he comes home. This again is to show the narrative story of him going through his home town bringing back these bad memories. From the lyrics we can see that the music video is one that would bring the audience sorrow and make them feel bad about all the different things that he has experienced throughout the city. For example if you go to "0:27" we can see that he talks about a girl at the age of three and he shows this in the video.

Contradicting       

This is when the lyrics have no relationship what so ever, from my personal opinion I think the artists main aim is to make the audience laugh, for example looking at "Hello -  Martin Solveig and Dragonette. The video, from start to finish, is simply two individuals playing tennis. The song itself had no implications that alluded to tennis what-so-ever - there wasn't any sort of relationships between the lyrics and visuals, music and visuals nor any other aspect of Goodwin's theory that I could conjure. Whilst also blunt, there were aspects of a slight relationship between lyrics and visuals - the lyrics were that of "I'm not the kind of girl..." and these lines occurred whilst there was a medium-shot of a young women present. 

Iconography

Iconography is when certain things within a music relate to specific type of genre, for example when we watch a Rap or a Hip-Hop music video we would expect to see the artist to have loads of cash and jewelry, for example looking at Snoop Dogs Drop it like its hot video, we can see these things straight away, like at 0:29 we see him with baggy clothes and exposed women behind him. What Iconography offers the audience is they get to gain a sense of what the artist is like and who they represent. this benefits the artists to show everyone the real person they really are. If the artists is well know and has a large fan base the genre will be listened to and will become or carry on being popular.
So how this relates to the audience, is that they feel a connection with their listening too, it represents the genre of music their listening too. 






Pop and pop music video's have many conventions and elements associated with them. Some of these include bright colours, numerous costume choices and changes and to all intensive purposes a 'bubblegum' innocence. Choreographed dance routines and wonderland settings are very much at the heart of any pop music video. Another iconic connotation is the complex use of narrative and pastel perfect backdrops. Pop music is very much about selling the featured artist and the use of camera and editing makes the audience see them in certain ways. For e.g., Katy Perry often uses sexualised shots to sell herself and the song.

Voyeurism 

Looking back at when Goodwin's book was written and published, in 1992 Hip-Hop and Rap had a lot of exposer to specific sexes, like for example we would see women that were very exposed, they had short skirts and low cut tops, but if we look at videos not much has changed but we still see women dressed like this in music videos. In 1970 a women called Laura Mulvey called this "The male gaze" women where treated like objects, they were almost decoration in a music video, they where something to grab the male viewers attention. If we look at Lady GaGa's "Born this way" we see glimpses of the male and female body, what this shows is that artists are beginning to think about who they want they're video to target and by showing eye candy that appeals to both men and women they are most likely to attract more people. At 3:09 we see her with both men and women wearing revealing clothing.

Star persona

 Star persona is where the producer would have the artist being showed in the video a lot, this would highlight they are the star within the music video and identify to the audience about who the video is about. Another reason a producer would do this to engage the audience about any facial expressions or any emotions that are being displayed by someone within the music video, looking at my video of Adele - Someone like you, from 0:09 to 1:29 we see that only Adele is shown on the screen where she is walking down the seafront. this tells the audience about who the artists is and identifies what theme of the song from the characteristics that are shown, such as the grey scale and the dull face given off Adele.

Intertextuality

Pastiche: Pastiche is a type of music video that takes reference to another media device or time period, but still gives recognition to the audience to where this re-enactment has come from, for example from the movie, "Gentlemen prefer blondes" made in 1953, there is a scene where the actress Marilyn Monroe is surrounded by men and flirting with all of them, and Madonna created a music video in 1984 called material girl, where she uses the scene from the movie and makes a song about it. looking at the video I have chosen you can see that, Madonna has almost copied everything from the movie, the same dress type even the same "set" set-up, the stairs and the red background. looking back at Madonna's music video we can see that she has used pastiche in this video, the use of the an another media device is being used and the use of using something from an older time period with very little updates to the original version. At "0:52" we see this scene that is shown in the material girl.

Parody:  This technique I used to make fun out of another media source, the benefits of dong to this, the audience can see things that are not outlined in the original video. the main aim of doing this is to make the song more appealing to the audience and make it more comical, looking at my example, "Carly Rae Jepsen - "Call Me Maybe" PARODY", we see that Bart Baker the artists keeps the beat of the original song but changes the lyrics to make it more comical, the final conclusion of making a parody song is to basically mock the original.