Thursday, 9 October 2014

Contemporary music videos are merely elaborate adverts with little artistic, social, or moral integrity. Discuss with reference to music videos and theorists you have studied.

Music video’s change over time hence contemporary ones showing evolution from original music videos. However Music videos can be seen as elaborate adverts as they were originally used to promote albums and make the producer money which in turn causes the music video’s to, lesson or lose their moral and social integrity, if they had any to begin with. There is other intentions for a music video rather than just advertisement, although not the most popular now a days, music videos could be used to enhance the lyrics from a visual aspect, helping make the narrative clear to the audience, this type of narrative encouraged and inspired me to do produce similar work in my project. This method of music video construction can be seen in contemporary music videos such as ‘The A team’ by Ed Sheeran.


Contemporary music video’s now focus more on the genre of the music and the star image that is being portrayed rather than the actual meaning behind the lyrics. This is as they want to advertise themselves to a certain target audience to achieve greatest possible profits. Some say this is as a result of commercial manufacturing constructing media such as magazines, websites, and picture to help promote a singer’s star image.




In videos such as Macklemore’s thrift shop he promotes his star image as a wealthy care free millionaire who can still represent working class through his mise en scen, yet originally he came from a troubled Irish background. Sven E Carlsson states in video’s such as Rihanna’s Esquire and in numerous Rick Ross songs/music video’s they have relation to fast and expensive cars such as the Aston martin. This is to portray a glamorous lifestyle for people to aspire to full of fast cars, pretty women money and criminalised lifestyle being deemed acceptable. The lyrical prospect of this song has some form of relation to the actual content within the footage, yet much like most mainstream 
contemporary music they focus more on the image than they do on the actual substance of the song. This can be seen showing no moral integrity trying to present the ideal lifestyle for people to try and achieve.


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  1. Please change the colour and formatting to make it readable.

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