Genre Research

Music videos always represent the genre of the music, because of this we have changed our mind on the type of genre. We decided to go with a less effects driven style of editing, and have decided to go with a song and band that are more story/performance driven.

In addition, we have looked at some professionally made music videos from different genres to pick out similarities. The first music video we looked at was Joy Division's "Love will tear us apart." Joy Division are a rock band and because they are this genre they have done a performance led video. They have done this to show the skill of the musicians playing their instruments and we see a lot of close up shots and low angles shots. The band also keep a serious look on their face through out the entire video, this represents their genre as if they were doing a pop video you would expect them to be smiling and jumping around with happy pink bunny rabbits.

The next music video we looked at Notorious B.I.G. "Juicy" In most hip hop videos we expect to see things such as

• Guns
• Girls
• Violence
• drugs
• expensive cars
• "bling"

And after watching a few hip hop videos, quite a lot of these appeared in the videos. All of the things listed above seem to be symbolic to the hip hop genre.

The next genre we looked at was electronic. We looked at three different music videos for this and they were, Fat Boy Slim's "Don't Let The Man Get You Down" - "Weapon Of Choice" and Audio Bullys "We Don't Care"

the official music video for "Don't Let The Man Get You Down" were banned from embedding, so click here to see it.

With the electronic genre, the usual trend is to not show to show the artist as there is no performance element to any of the videos listed above. With this type of genre the music video is usually narrative based. The video could have worked without the music and with dialogue, it has been as if a short story.

Specifically with the Fat Boy Slim music video "Weapon Of Choice", the video was made to have a comedy element to it by using the actor Christopher Walken. It is supposed to be funny because in most of the films he is in he always seems to play a fairly psychopathic antagonist. So when you see him in this, it has subverted his stereotypical appearance to someone dancing around and acting silly.

We learnt from our genre research, typical techniques used for specific genres and how it varies from genre to genre.