How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the Close Study Products ‘Ghost Town’ and ‘Letter To The Free’

Narrative is defined as a spoken or written account of connected events. Narrative theories look at recognisable and familiar structures that help us to understand both how narratives are constructed and what they might mean. Some narratives may be linear and sequential, starting at the beginning with a clear middle and end. Whereas others may have flashbacks, flash forwards or even parallel narratives.  In commons ‘Letter To The Free’ there are two strands running parallel through the video: narrative and performance. The narrative is the story that runs through the video, in this case it is the journey of the black box, and the performance element, when the artist sings to the camera. Roland Barthes identifies five different kinds of semiotic elements that are common to all texts. These five codes are Hermeneutic, Proairetic, Semantic, Symbolic, and Cultural. A hermeneutic code is a mystery within a text that is not immediately answered, in Common’s ‘letter to the free’ the black box is a hermeneutic code, we do not know the exact purpose of it and it is left to our imagination. There are also many cultural codes in this text, a cultural code refers to anything in the text which refers to an external body of knowledge such as scientific, historical, and cultural knowledge. This video and song was produced for the documentary ‘the 13th’ which is about racism, the abolition of slavery and mass incarceration. An example of a cultural code is the lyric ‘shot me with your raygun, now you’re trying to trump me’, this is referring to former and current republican presidents of the USA, Ronald Raegan and Donald Trump. In Ghost town by the specials there are also many cultural codes, the video was produced just after Margret Thatcher was elected as prime minister. Interest rates and taxes were put up which reduced the inflation, this caused one million people to become unemployed between 1980 and 1981. It hit the African-Carribean community the most, the racial tension and the slim chance of landing a job caused many riots in the streets. This is demonstrated in the lyrics of their songs ‘Government leaving the youth on the shelf, This place, is coming like a ghost town’.