How Useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to Close study products “Ghost Town” and “Letter to the Free” in your answer. [12 marks] 

How Useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to Close study products “Ghost Town” and “Letter to the Free” in your answer. [12 marks] 

Narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events; a story. Narrative theory analyses media texts and how they are conveyed or communicated to the audience. 

There are many theories based of narrative or stories one of which is Vladimir Propp’s character theory, this theory identifies the main type of characters used in most narrative media. For example nearly every movie or book follows a main character, this character usually does good deeds or takes actions to benefit others therefore he could be labelled as a hero. Another narrative theory that links to this is the binary opposites theory by Levi-Strauss which suggests that narratives are structed using opposites like heroes vs villains or light vs dark, there are examples for this theory in nearly every action film for example star wars. 

In commons letter to the free you are to link his music video to Vladmir Propp’s character theory as the lyrics to letter to the free mention the 13^th amendment and the new Jim crow these link to the history of black people and how they are victims, also showing how police men or the whole justice system are made out to be heroes as they “protect people” and “uphold peace” but they are just false hero’s. However, I believe that narrative theories don’t apply to letter to the free as they would to a film or a book. This is because letter to the free isn’t a story and looks more at how black people are being incarcerated and is used to change people’s ideals and not be blinded to how other people being treated just because of their colour.