Explain how representations used in Music Videos communicate information about their cultural and political contexts.

Music videos can convey a lot more subtly and or powerful messages that other forms of communication can’t. The political point, The Specials were trying to get across was, the experiences they observed whilst touring around England and the event happening around England in the 1980’s. In the 1980’s England experienced a recession in the industrial workplace. As a result, in 1981 the recession had left the country suffering badly, and unemployment increased immensely with It being estimated that over 3 million were unemployed in the UK around this time.

The video itself constitutes “eerie” and from my research a great quote that links to the idea of the song and music video is  Mark Fisher’s work, “The Weird And The Eerie”, to understand it. He wrote how,

The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.

Here, in a major capital city, where the streets should be teeming, there is no-one but The Specials, a group of young black and white men, from a depressed and demoralised Midlands town. They are in charge. 

As if to further underline this, the camera was placed on the car bonnet so we see The Specials as if they are crashing into us. And when they all sing “yah, ya ya, ya, yaah, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya, ya…”, they seem like an insane Greek chorus, before Lynval Golding, the band’s rhythm guitarist and vocalist, murmurs the last line “the people getting angry”. The song fades out in dub reggae tradition, inconclusive, echoing.

The summer of 1981 saw riots in over 35 locations around the UK. In response to the linking of the song to these events, singer Terry Hall said, “When we recorded ‘Ghost Town’, we were talking about 1980’s riots in Bristol and Brixton. The fact that it became popular when it did was just a weird coincidence.” The song created resentment in Coventry where residents angrily rejected the characterisation of the city as a town in decline.

England was hit by recession and away riots were breaking out across its urban areas. Deprived, forgotten, run down and angry, these were places where young people, black and white, erupted. In these neglected parts of London, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool the young, the unemployed, and the disaffected fought pitch battles with the police. 

“Ghost Town” was the mournful sound of these riots, a poetic protest. It articulates anger at a state structure, an economic system and an entrenched animosity towards the young, black, white and poor. It asks,

“Why must the youth fight against themselves.”

The streets that The Specials conjure up in “Ghost Town” are inhabited by ghosts; dancing is a memory, silence reigns. The sounds of life, community, creativity are no longer, “bands don’t play no more”. In the song’s short bridge section in the bright key of G major, Hall asks us to,

“remember the good old days/before the ghost town/ when we danced and sang, and the music played in de boom town”.