Tuesday 10 August 2010

Intertextuality and Music Videos



Music videos have been around since the 1920's. Many Jazz musicians of that time, for example Bessie Smith, made short clips to go with popular songs.
In the 1970's the record industry discovered Tv Shows as a opportunity to promote artists. Short 'promos' they created started to replace the live performances of the artist on the Tv.
1975 Bohemian Rhapsody released a huge successful video which was released by Queen. They made the begining og the video era and set the trend for the modern music video. The video is considered to be one of the first ever to use advaned visual effects.

Since cinema came around, it created the ability to bring songs and music to life. The advances to technology have changed the music video industry into the great success it is today with amazing visual effects.

Directors who started making music videos;
David Fincher, he made Madonna (material girl), Vogue and Express yourself
Spike Jonze, made Fatboy Slim and Praise You.
Michael Gondry created Bjork and Foo Fighters music videos.


Intertextuality examples;

Red Hot Chili Peppers - californication
The intertexulity used is a video game.
The movement of the characters in the video game fits into the beat perfectly by the transitions and movements.
The characters of the game look asif they are singing to the song also. The lyrics fit in perfectly also, when the band mention a pregnant woman in their song, an animation of a pregnant woman appears in the action game. So not only does the music video fit into the beat, it fits perfectly in with visuals too.
The audience relises eventually that the aim of the game is to collect certain tockens to gain more points, the tockens are the bands logo, so they use their brand identity also, we notice that the animations in the game are actually the members of the band, they look really simular.
I think this is really successful because the video is narrative based through a video game, this engages the audience as we are interested all the time in what is going to happen next to the anaimations in the video, whilst we still see the bands personal touches by including their logo, and the the characters are them too, the music video does not contrast with the lyrics atall, they have included many anaimations, and effets to match the lyrics. The music video is of a high quality also.



Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood (their first video)
The inspiration of Thriller by Michael Jackson comes into the video at some point.
This music video is really clever as the visuals match the music.
The Gorillaz have used their anaimation video as their brand indentity, all their music videos and album covers, images ect are all animated.




1993 REM- Bad day
They have used the theme of a TV news report.




The music fits in really well with the transistions,
all news reporters sing the lyrics. There are many effects like two people talking to a news reporter in their home with a rain cloud above their head to refelect their mood.













Intertextuality is also in fashion and photography.
1999- Shania Twain- Man I feel like a woman.
She was inspired by Robert Palmer- Addicted to Love.
Shania copied the video with just a few personal changes. The video is really simple, they both consist of the lead singer at the centre of the screen singing down a micro phone, dressed in lovely clothes that were the fashion at the time, sourounded by models, Shania chose male models, all good looking and again, dressed in fashionable clothes asif it was a cat walk.
On the other hand, Robert Palmer used female models.
Neither of the videos tell a story, they both just include models in the background looking pretty/handsome but really they are just posing and not even playing their instruments.
These music videos are perfomance based.
I think this works well in both music videos as they appeal to both genres, the male are atrracted to the Shania Twain, and female to the male models at the background.

Quotes;

John Stuart- 'Incorparating, raiding and reconstructing essentailly the essence of intertexuality.'

'Generate both potentially nostalgic associations and new meanings'

'Use something the audience may be familuar with to'

'Possibale exeption of advertising'


Unfortunatly, because of limitation of resources/software available at schools, we cannot make any musi videos to the high standard these are.

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