My music video uses the conventions of real
traditional rap music videos effectively and convincingly. John Fiske, media
theorist said that genre is convenient to audience and producers, and this is
particularly true in the case of a big genre like rap music, where people are
drawn towards watching music videos and buying/downloading music from their favorite
genres. With traditional rap this would be even more the case because it is a
well-established genre that audiences and fans are very familiar with.
The first way that my music video
advertising campaign uses conventions of real media products is in the use of setting.
I live in Southampton, a big urban city so we had lots of appropriate settings
on our doorstep. Even so we were restricted to the locations that we could organize
during the college day, so we used the features of the setting such as
railings, and high rise buildings to get a sense of the place as urban as
possible for the C2DE target audience making sure we had a shot just focused on
a high rise block of council flats to give the impression of a hard life that
the target audience would be able to relate to. This is a convention that we
saw in real traditional rap music videos such as Eminem’s “Not Afraid”, where
it is set in a city and Eminem is stood looking out at the top of buildings as
we have used in our music video which helps justify the social messages in
Eminem’s lyrics, for example in the song “Stan”: “Some dude was drunk and drove
his car over a bridge and had his girlfriend in the trunk, and she was pregnant
with his kid”. The messages in this music video are similar to our messages about
not turning to alcohol to drown your problems. We could have used a different
location for the inside shots instead of the sixth form building to keep the
idea of a hard life and a personal life outside of college and that would have
improved the look of our music video to be more believable as a real text. The
outside shots are more effective, because they give an appropriately urban feel
and they represent the star as a person who has faced difficulties in their
life, which is reflected in the lyrics. For example the medium-long shots of
the main star rapping on the steps are more believable as a public location,
rather than an educational building.
There are many other ways that we conformed
to the conventions of real media products. For example: the use of close ups on
the star. From our research we found that this can sometimes be a part of the
contract with the record company to have a certain amount of close-ups on the
main star. This is because they want the main star’s image to be well-known and
to be the marketing hook that makes the audience want to buy the music. I can
understand this using Richard Dyer’s star theory, where the term ‘pop
performer’ and ‘pop star’ have become interchangeable, and the idea of the
‘star’ has become very important including their persona that is not strictly
limited to the music itself. This allows them to become a media sensation in
popular magazines, TV and other methods of advertising including viral
marketing, creating not only a musical input to the industry but a brand and a
brand awareness. This means that the pop star is a constructed image, and we
would need to do the same if we wanted to achieve maximum success with our
product and our brand. We use star theory to make a star that was recognizable
by having lots of close ups, mid-close ups and many shots of the main star in
the music video, and we also chose to have images of the star on both ancillary
tasks the digipak and the music magazine advert to build up his image in the
fans eyes.
However, there are a few ways that we went
against conventions in traditional rap for good reasons. One way was to portray
a negative representation of the main star at the end of the music video. This
was to bring out our ideology that drinking to excess will lead to bad things
happening in your life. We wanted to appeal to the young, funatic audience
(life matrix segments) but we also wanted to send a message that going too far
with drinking is dangerous. This is not a normal message sent in music videos such
as Dr Dre’s Kush which I have researched on my blog, where “Kush up” refers to
lighting up a joint of cannabis. This glorifies abusing a substance. Also,
there are other songs like “Gin and Juice” by Snoop Dog and Asher Roth called
“College” which glorify drinking to the point of abuse. However we did get this
idea from researching Eminem, where we saw his rapping about real life social
problems and negative issues, which is a big contrast to the shallow messages
in rap music videos such as 50 Cent’s Candy Shop, which shows negative messages
about the party life style and about women.
Another way that we challenged conventions
of the rap genre is the way we showed gender. We decided to challenge the
sexist images of women shown in so many traditional rap music videos because
the images we saw in other videos were showing women as sexually objectified
(Laura Mulvey, 1975) and constructed only to please the male gaze. As a result,
we made sure both genders were represented in the video, and that neither males
or females are sexualised or objectified. We did this also by having both male
and female characters rapping, and wearing similar styles of clothes. The male
character seems to be of a higher status because he is the main star in the
music video. However he is shown negatively at the end of the video because he
has drunk to excess and needs to be helped by the female star. Therefore she is
constructed positively because she remains at a higher status at the end of the
video, and because she is wearing fashionable but not revealing sexy clothing.
We also managed to stay within the
conventions of the genre by using the conventional forms for example by using
an abstract narrative centered around the star in the main music video and by
using features of the correct form of the platform that we were working on. For
example making sure we included the date in the magazine advert, and making
sure we put a parental advisory sicker on both ancillary texts.
Overall we used genre well in our planning
and construction of our media products to show that we understood and could use
the conventions of the genre and also that we could challenge certain parts of
it to get our message across, whilst also keeping it looking within the genre
so that fans would definitely buy our media product.
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