How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the close study products ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Letter To The Free’ in your answer

Narrative in music videos are important as it adds a story and structure to the music video. Vladimir Propp explains how each story has 7 main characters; the hero, the villain, the princess, the victim, the dispatcher, the false hero and the father. Todorov explains how each narrative should follow a structure of equilibrium, disruption and then new equilibrium.

Analysing the music video for Ghost Town, there is a clear equilibrium, disruption and new equilibrium. The music video starts with the band driving down a lone road with no cars around, giving it an eerie and ghostly feel. In the middle of the music video, the band drive the car uncontrollably, this may represent how the unemployment rate started spiraling uncontrollably. Then as we enter the last part of the music video we see the new equilibrium start to play out as the band has much more gentle approach with throwing rocks across the water, creating the feeling that the madness has passed and they are in a much more normal state of world.

Analysing Letter To The Free, the equilibrium would be the guy playing the piano alone, which symbolises a lone voice expressing their self. The disruption in the middle would either be the appearance of the black square which could symbolise an empty space/feeling, or it would be all the people joining in which shows a group chant of them expressing the same feelings. And then the new equilibrium would be the pianist going back to playing by himself with the mellow tune like he started out with.

Referring back to the question, I believe that narrative’s are very important when analysing music videos, this is due to being able to follow a clear story line and see a dilemma pop up, like an incident which affects a character or changes the mood of the story, and then having the final equilibrium which shows that the dilemma got resolved.