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.