Tamas A2 Media

Identifying Narrative Conventions of Rock/ Indie Music Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWhairF_DS8

This is the link to the music video for “Use Somebody” by the popular rock group Kings of Leon, who share a similarity with The New York Fund in terms of a country & western tone to their rock music. This music video is heavily focused on the band’s lifestyle and live performance abilities, with the narrative being devoted to footage of live performance and the band’s preparations beforehand. This lends much to representing the band as an ‘experience’ who the audience will want to see live, since bands today rely increasingly on revenue from gigs. Furthermore, the scenes of the band preparing for the gig, as they share jokes in the dressing room or are huddled together on stage, give the audience a snapshot of the personality of the band, allowing the audience to be closer to them. This allows the audience to better relate to the band, especially the scenes where they are seen hanging out at the pub, as they look like genuine, everyday situations which the audience are likely to do themselves, allowing them to build a stronger relationship with the band. This up-close and personal representation of the band represents them as easily likeable and is effective at increasing their popularity. This type of music video is very conventional in the rock genre, as bands often use it once they’re fairly established in order to advertise their popularity and prolificacy in terms of live performances. For example, many parallels can be drawn between this video and the music video for Guns and Roses’ “Paradise City”. Both videos are highly personal in nature, heavily performance-based in narrative and jump between black-and-white footage and colour footage to highlight the double-life of the bands (i.e. normal everyday life vs. life as performers).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvgZkm1xWPE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwrq2o6Woiw

The performance-based music video is the most conventional rock/ indie music video, meaning that an interesting narrative-based music video can often stand out. For example, The Arctic Monkeys have produced a number of memorable narrative-based music videos, with little or no performance element. Whilst performance-based music videos allow audiences to get closer to bands and increase the bands popularity in this way, narrative-base videos are sometimes bizarre, more memorable and can act as shock tactics to get bands noticed. For example, “Fluorescent Adolescent” by The Arctic Monkeys has a seemingly incomprehensible narrative that’s almost completely unrelated to the narrative of the song, but is incredibly memorable.

Radiohead’s “Just”, however, combines a conventional performance element with a storyline to create an effective hook which keeps the audience watching until the end. This is a highly effective method as the performance of the band creates appeal but the storyline beside it prevents it from being predictable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIFLtNYI3Ls

In conclusion, there are several types of narratives used in music videos, the most effective of which are those that successfully use generic conventions as well as develop them in order to keep genre dynamic