Films usually have a linear structure as in they start at ’00:00′ and run for a set length of time. This means they have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Todorov said that a good story should have an equilibrium, disruption and a new equilibrium.

Propp suggests that stories use stock characters

Claude Levi-Strauss, Binary oppositions. This suggests that narratives are structured around binary oppositions e.g. good vs bad, human vs alien, young vs old.

Flashback, Parallel narrative, An enigma code (puzzle, something to resolve), Light and shade

1. Pastiche – a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist
2. Parody – a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony
3. Bricolage – a useful term to apply to postmodernist texts as it ‘involves the rearrangement and juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs to produce new codes of meaning’
4. Intertextuality – surface signs, gestures and play
5. Metanarrative – A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; French: métarécit) in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism is a narrative about narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.
6. Hyper reality – Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies.
7. Simulacrum – Not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative that is ‘truth‘ in its own right: an understanding of uncertain/certainty that Baudrillard terms the hyperreal.
8. Conumerist Society – is one in which people devote a great deal of time, energy, resources and thought to “consuming”. The general view of life in a consumerist society is consumption is good, and more consumption is even better. The United States is an example of a hyper-consumerist society.
9. Fragmentary Identities – As an example, mobile telephony (both hardware and software) now appears to proliferate and connect every aspect of our lives, and generally does so from the perspective of consumption – consuming images, sounds, stories, messages etc – rather than production. Alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.
10. Implosion – an instance of something collapsing violently inwards.
11. cultural appropriation – the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.
12. Reflexivity – generally refers to the examination of one’s own beliefs, judgments and practices during the research process and how these may have influenced the research. If positionality refers to what we know and believe then reflexivity is about what we do with this knowledge.

Postmodernism is a way of seeing the world. New expressions of of identity and being – often found in popular culture and modern technology, are all new iterations (versions) of previous expressions of popular culture.

Shuker refers to Fredric Jameson about that ’embody the postmodern condition.

Hard to distinguish reality from fiction

Style over substance. Put another way, are we more interested in the surface of an object than its’ inner meaning?

Richard Hoggart (uses of literacy) – Lost our neighborhood lives, we are more concerned and centered around consumption

Fragmentary consumption = Fragmentary identities. As an example, mobile telephony (both hardware and software) now appears to proliferate and connect every aspect of our lives, and generally does so from the perspective of consumption – consuming images, sounds, stories, messages etc – rather than production. Alienated individuals living (precariously) in fragmented societies.

Loss of metanarrative

Jean Baudrillard would describe as Implosion which gives rise to what he terms Simulacra.

Orientalism : Edward Said. Link between culture, imperial power and colonialism. “The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism”. creating ‘an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western consciousness‘.

V. G. Kiernan : ‘an economic system like a nation or a religion, lives not by bread alone, but by beliefs, visions, daydreams as well, and these may be no less vital to it for being erroneous’.

Jacques Lacan : exploring ‘The Other’ as a way of exploring ourselves.

Louis Althusser : ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation, Ideological state apparatus is a theoretical concept developed by French philosopher Louis Althusser which is used to describe the way in which structures of civic society education, culture, the arts, the family, religion, bureaucracy, administration etc serve to structure the ideological perspectives of society, which in turn form our individual subject identity.

Frantz Fanon : In terms of post-colonialism, we can look at The Wretched of the Earth (1961), by Frantz Fanon, which for many (Barry, 2017, McLeod 2000 etc) is a key text in the development and ancestry of postcolonial criticism. As an early critical thinker of post-colonialism, Frantz Fanon took an active role, proposing the first step required for ‘colonialised’ people to reclaim their own past by finding a voice and an identity.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony. Tug of war for power. Chance to reclaim. Gramsci raises the concept of Hegemony to illustrate how certain cultural forms predominate over others, which means that certain ideas are more influential than others.

Paul Gilroy : Is insistent that ‘we must become interested in how the literary and cultural as well as governmental dynamics of the country have responded to that process of change and what it can tell us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.’

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.

Double consciousness. Cultural polyvalency.

• Q1: Where can you identify ‘hybridity’, ‘ambiguity’ and ‘cultural polyvalency’ in this music video?
• Q2: How does this text apply to Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellation)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

• Q1: How can you apply the concept of Orientalism to Common’s Letter to the Free?
• Q2: Can you apply Fanon’s 3 phase plan of action to this music video?
• Q3: How is the audience called / addressed / hailed (interpellated)? Use examples from both the lyrics and the visual grammar (shot, edit, mise-en-scene) to show how audiences are drawn into a specific subject position / ideological framework?

Representation: The female form

Structural level and textual level – individual images

Radical and reactionary

Toril Moi: Feminist = A political position

Female = A matter of biology

Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Laura Mulvey – Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. The signs of visual please and the male gaze. Women as an image and the male as the bearer of the look. Pleasure in looking has been split between active male/ passive female. Scopophiloia is the natural pleasure in looking, Vouyerism is the sexual pleasure gained in looking.

Raunch Culture – The sexualised performance of women in the media

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to CSP “Ghost Town” and “Letter to the Free” in your answer.

Narrative in a music video is important because it brings structure and meaning and a story to the video. Todorov said how each narrative should follow a structure of equilibrium, disruption and then new equilibrium. This just gives the narrative story excitement and meaning. Vladimir Propp talks about how each story has 7 different character types which correspond to the story. Lastly Lev Strauss binary opposites and how in narrative there are binary opposites within the characters.

Looking at the music video ghost town, it has an equilibrium, disruption and a new equilibrium. It starts with the band driving along the road, set in east London, giving off a ghostly atmosphere. The middle shows the band suddenly drive out of control, representing the employment state, and how it has become a large problem, as unemployment rates in the UK were rising significantly. For the end of the music video, it shows the band throwing rocks along the water on the beach, representing the calmness that has been resonated, and how everything has returned back to normal, suggesting the economic state has retuned back to normal.

For letter to the free, the equilibrium would be the man playing the drums on his own at the beginning, the disruption would then be everyone else joining in, and then the new equilibrium would be the man singing and playing the piano on his own.

Linking back to the question, narrative is useful when analyzing music videos, as it allows the audience to capture the perceptions and messages. As using just a speaker to convey a message can be difficult, so applying narrative to music videos is important.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhVpEc5NaUKa7J34wvHzFMsysRbPrO_L/view?usp=sharing

MY SONG CHOICE:

• Pastiche– an artistic work in a style that imitates that of another work, artist, or period.
• Bricolage – (in art or literature) construction or creation from a diverse range of available things. something constructed or created from a diverse range of things.
• Intertextuality – Intertextuality is the shaping of a text’s meaning by another text. It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature that reflect and influence an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality – the relation between texts that are inflicted by means of quotations and allusion.
• Implosion – a sudden failure or collapse of an organization or system.
• cultural appropriation – the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.

These relate to the style models because they are all sad songs with deep meanings behind them which link to the definitions.

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1. COLONIALISM – Electronic colonialism theory explains how mass media are leading to a new concept of empire. It will not be one based on military power or land acquisition, but one based on controlling the mind. It is a psychological or mental empire.  
2. POST COLONIALISM – Postcolonialism, the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism.  
3. DIASPORA – A diaspora is a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale. Historically, the word diaspora was used to refer to the involuntary mass dispersion of a population from its indigenous territories, in particular the dispersion of Jews.  
4. BAME – BAME is a term long used in the UK to refer to black, Asian and minority ethnic people. Its origin derives from “political blackness”, an idea that various ethnic groups united behind to fight against discrimination in the 1970s.  
5. DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS (GILROY) – Modernity and Double Consciousness is a 1993 history book about a distinct black Atlantic culture that incorporated elements from African, American, British, and Caribbean cultures. It was written by Paul Gilroy and was published by Harvard University Press and Verso Books. 
6. CULTURAL ABSOLUTISM / RACIAL ESSENTIALISM – Cultural Absolutism is the idea that there are certain principles and sets of values that are objectively right or wrong in every context. According to cultural absolutism, the universal is considered free from cultural, historical, and social conditions. The literature commonly defines racial essentialism as a belief in a genetic or biological essence that defines all members of a racial category (e.g., Race Conceptions Scale; Williams and Eberhardt, 2008; cf. 
7. CULTURAL SYNCRETISM – Cultural syncretism is when distinct aspects of different cultures blend to make something new and unique. Since culture is a wide category, this blending can come in the form of religious practices, architecture, philosophy, recreation, and even food. 
8. ORIENTALISM (SAID) – Orientalism is a 1978 book by Edward W. Said, in which the author developed the idea of “Orientalism” to define the West’s historically patronizing representations of “The East”—the societies and peoples who inhabit the places of Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East. 
9. APPROPRIATION – Cultural appropriation, at times also phrased cultural misappropriation, is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture by members of another culture. This can be controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from disadvantaged minority cultures. 
10. CULTURAL HEGEMONY – In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society — the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values, and mores — so that the imposed, ruling-class worldview becomes the accepted cultural norm; the universally valid dominant ideology, which justifies the social, political, and economic status quo as natural and inevitable, perpetual and beneficial for every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class. 
11. THE PUBLIC SPHERE (HABERMAS) – Habermas defines the public sphere as a “society engaged in critical public debate”. Conditions of the public sphere are according to Habermas: The formation of public opinion. All citizens have access. 
12. THE ROLE OF PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING IN TERMS OF FAIR REPRESENTATION OF MINORITY GROUPS / INTERESTS – The Media Act requires public broadcasters to provide a varied range of programs in the fields of information, culture, education and entertainment. They are also responsible for providing a reliable news service. Their programs should not be aimed just at a large audience.