A music video will have a narrative shown through the song itself through lyrics as well as video clips displayed throughout the track. The video usually lasts for about 2 to 5 minutes and there are multiple clips which create a structure. This is known as structuralism. This can be shown through different settings which can have different meanings and representations. Each music video made by different artists can have a radical ideology which opposes the dominant ideology of what society deems as normal. Most music videos have a linear structure of: start, middle and finish. This is important especially to music videos as they are limited to time and keep the audience entertained. This is the theory of Toderov who states that if the structure is linear, it’s easier for the audience to analyse and deconstruct which allows them to understand the narrative that the artist is trying to portray more effectively.

A music video that is representative of linear structuralism is Commons letter to the free. The music video uses lyrics as well as visuals, such as the black square in a prison (start), to convey how black people were used as slaves and thrown in jail simply so the prison could stay open and provide jobs for white people. This is why “freedom” is lyrically used a lot through the music video to show how black people have rights just as much as everyone else and deserve freedom. This is sung by two black ladies who are in prison and look helpless as they just want to go about life as everyone else does (middle). This hopefully allows for the audience to become empathetic and understand if this had ever happened to them, they’d want their freedom too. This can be represented when the black square is out in an open field but will never truly be free which is represented by the black and white (end). This should then inform and persuade people to help stand against racist remarks from people in power who use their political power for money.

A second music called Ghost town (created by the specials) uses a different structure and can be considered a binary opposite. The videos narrative starts with the band driving in a car with very unusual lighting which looks faded, this could be a correlation on why they called the video ghost town. The video looks as if it’s trying to give of an element of horror which can also be heard through the doom like music. This allows the audience to understand how the video is a combination as well as a binary opposition which allows the audience to understand multiple versions of reality for different races. An example of this is how a white male can get away with looking suspicious where as a black person could get shot for grabbing an item if stopped by police. The specials did this by also using police sirens in their audio and them messing around by throwing stones at the end of the video. At this time, this music video would have been seen as radical to society as it attacked the political right wing which was considered the dominant ideology.

Music Videos are how listeners identify artists with a song. They are short, moving image shots for the purpose of accompanying a music track made by the artist/s in order to encourage sales of the music. The narratives of these music videos are organised around a specific theme and are based on an idea giving a structure to these videos to follow (structuralism), “Structuralism has been very powerful in its influence on narrative theory. Its main virtue is that it is most interested in those things that narratives have in common, rather than in the distinctive characteristics of specific narratives.” – Turner p.85 ‘Film as Social Practice’ (source: http://mymediacreative.com/narrative/). Structure is so important to any form of media, especially within a music video when an artist/s is trying to convey a message because if the structure isn’t properly put in place e.g. a linear and sequential structure (beginning, middle, end – Todorov’s Tripartite Narrative Structure and Freytag’s Pyramid) then the audience won’t be able to decode, deconstruct and analyse the music video and get the artist’s message and therefore the music video would fail to serve it’s purpose.

An example of narrative theory in Common’s Letter to the Free is Seymour Chatman’s Satellites and Kernels. In the music video, the visuals are more based and related to the lyrics rather than a visual story other music videos may follow e.g. Avicii’s Wake Me Up. the kernels within Letter to the Free is the fact that this song has been made about the black slavery in america and how the 13th amendment still allows prisoners to be taken in as slaves, poking at the fact that a reason for so many african americans being locked up in america may be because of racially fuelled police officers and other higher racist powers in america’s corrupt police system. The satellites in Letter to the Free are the repeated lyric of “freedom” is being chanted and sung throughout the song in the background encouraging us to release ourselves from the‘mental slavery’ of racism and to instead, embrace the fact that freedom will eventually come. This can also show how audiences may mentally position themselves politically by their socio-cultural status to offer different views and readings of the narrative in the music video, “Letter to the Free”.The narrative structure in Ghost Town by The Specials is very different, it follows Claude Levi Strauss’ Binary Oppositions. It’s narrative in the music video consists of ominous shots of an empty East End of London with the band in a car lip syncing to the song referencing a large variety of iconic film styles including thriller and horror genres, evident from and by the expressionist lighting that brings different meanings of the lyric ‘ghost town’ helping us develop an understanding of the processes of selection, combination and binary oppositions that the band is trying to represent and show which constructs versions of reality. Rather than presenting opposing characters, The Specials were showing opposing views which was unusual for the time it was made in because of them conveying a strong social message within the video instead of going with the dominant ideology style of other popular music and their music videos at the time. The audience who watched the video may have potentially shocked them because they were so used to the non-politically fuelled videos being produced at that time e.g. Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic By The Police.