A music video will have a narrative shown through the song itself through lyrics as well as video clips displayed throughout the track. The video usually lasts for about 2 to 5 minutes and there are multiple clips which create a structure. This is known as structuralism. This can be shown through different settings which can have different meanings and representations. Each music video made by different artists can have a radical ideology which opposes the dominant ideology of what society deems as normal. Most music videos have a linear structure of: start, middle and finish. This is important especially to music videos as they are limited to time and keep the audience entertained. This is the theory of Toderov who states that if the structure is linear, it’s easier for the audience to analyse and deconstruct which allows them to understand the narrative that the artist is trying to portray more effectively.

A music video that is representative of linear structuralism is Commons letter to the free. The music video uses lyrics as well as visuals, such as the black square in a prison (start), to convey how black people were used as slaves and thrown in jail simply so the prison could stay open and provide jobs for white people. This is why “freedom” is lyrically used a lot through the music video to show how black people have rights just as much as everyone else and deserve freedom. This is sung by two black ladies who are in prison and look helpless as they just want to go about life as everyone else does (middle). This hopefully allows for the audience to become empathetic and understand if this had ever happened to them, they’d want their freedom too. This can be represented when the black square is out in an open field but will never truly be free which is represented by the black and white (end). This should then inform and persuade people to help stand against racist remarks from people in power who use their political power for money.

A second music called Ghost town (created by the specials) uses a different structure and can be considered a binary opposite. The videos narrative starts with the band driving in a car with very unusual lighting which looks faded, this could be a correlation on why they called the video ghost town. The video looks as if it’s trying to give of an element of horror which can also be heard through the doom like music. This allows the audience to understand how the video is a combination as well as a binary opposition which allows the audience to understand multiple versions of reality for different races. An example of this is how a white male can get away with looking suspicious where as a black person could get shot for grabbing an item if stopped by police. The specials did this by also using police sirens in their audio and them messing around by throwing stones at the end of the video. At this time, this music video would have been seen as radical to society as it attacked the political right wing which was considered the dominant ideology.

Postmodernism is about referencing the self around today’s society. It suggests that the world has lost the main narrative and how about society only cares about how they appear to people.

RE-IMAGINING

PASTICHE: A piece that imitates an ready existing piece.

PARODY: Making a joke of a piece of existing work.

COPY: Directly remaking a piece of work.

BRICOLAGE

Fragmentary consumption = Fragementary identities. This means that there is no depth to people as society want to show people once aspect of themselves.

parallel narrative- where separate stories/narratives take place simultaneously/at the same time.

proairetic Code:  action, movement, causation

 hermenuetic Code:  reflection, dialogue, character or thematic development

Enigma code: Raise ideas for the audience to intrigue them which makes the audience want more information

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.

Started with the ending reversed and then jumped to “present day”

Monologue

Middle: attacked acused guy and there was a confrontation, killed him. reverses back to the very start of the day again, giving away clues and hints as well as lean what Lenard is like. He doesnt remember anything in short term but remembers his wife dying. writed himself notes to remember things so he can find his wifes killer

According to Thompson (1990) ‘in studying narrative structure, we can seek to identify the specific narrative devices which operate within a particular narrative, and to elucidate their role in telling a story

Narrative:

story:

plot:

Binary Oppositions: how a story will always have a good protagonist and a bad antagonist

Ellison or Elipsis- Flash forward or flashback and some content can go missing such as a half hour to meet someone. These also tend to break a linear sequence.

Dramatic Irony: audience know something that the characters of a narrative don’t.

Foreshadowing: Where something/ plot line is hinted at before the event occurs.

Judith butler suggests that human gender is leant through nature. ‘Gender as performativity.’ This means that we learn gender stereotypes and adapt them to our sex (genetalia) and it’s not how we are born, which is known as nature. As we grow older we begin to ‘act out’ the social gender norms and are more likely to conform to others of our gender which builds friendships. However there can be exceptions where other stereotypes are then made such as sexuality. An example of this is where a young boy conforms with young girls and acts like they do which makes people assume he will grow up to be gay. This is now adapted into modern day feminism, which can be represented in many media forms, especially music videos. She suggests that gender is fluid ‘Gender fluidity’, changeable and plural, meaning society can have the ability to alter the way genders are looked at by society and break gender normativity.

‘Blurred Lines’ which is a music video created by Robin Thicke was published in 2013. It was a massive controversy, opposing the third wave of feminisms ideology in the mid 1990s. The music video portrays women as highly sexualised passive sex objects to serve the needs of men. The music video was constructed to get a message across about how they think women should be represented, the modern day feminist society was outraged by this attempt to push back the feminist movement. They knew that this ideology of ‘women’ needed to change, to accomplish this they had to alter societies view on culture of racism and sexism.

Barker and Jane, who were english fiction writers, realized that the third wave feminism is a rebellion of women from younger generations that are against what was perceived, by older generations, as the dominant ideology of that time which was ‘obedient to men’ and was ‘sex negative’. Feminists of an older generation took the approach to enhance characteristics of ‘sex positive’ and the reappropriation of derogatory terms like ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory uses.

Forth wave feminism began in 2012. A difference between third and fourth was feminism is that the forth wave of feminism had more support as there were multiple charities. An example of a charity is ‘Fawcett society’ which fought for equality and women’s rights.

Auckland Uni produced a ‘parody’ version of the “Blurred Lines” music video as a response. This was to provoke/enhance the message of how women were poorly represented in the media. The creator reversed the roles of the music video. This was to show men how it feels when women are oppressed by objectifying them. To do this, women acted like the men whilst the men acted like the women from the original music video. This was able to portray the use of new media and how technologies have been adapted to be able to show and help carry the feminist agenda further.

DEFINITIONS

Copy: where you make the same (replicate) thing that’s already been created.

Pastiche: Something that looks like or imitates something else.

Bricolage:  involves the change of juxtaposition of previously unconnected signs which produces new codes of meaning.

Intertextuality: Shaping a text’s meaning by a different text.

Implosion: The fall of a system.

Cultural Appropriation: inappropriately adapting a culture into ones own/ different culture.

Simulacrum: A simulation of reality

Hyperreality: When a simulation is more realistic than reality.

Metanarrative: Narratives that have an historical meaning, experience, or knowledge allowing the completion of an overall master idea.

Parody: Making fun of a piece of work made by someone else by recreating it.

Consumerist Society: A type of society where people devote a great deal of their life to “consuming”. 

Reflexivity: The evaluation of a person’s own beliefs, judgments and practices.

Intertextuality: signs that only have reference to other signs.

PARODY VS PASTICHE

Pastiche is a piece of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that copy’s the work of a previous artist. Instead, a Parody is a work or performance that copy’s another work or performance with ridicule or irony to make fun of it.

FRAGMENTARY CONSUMPTION = FRAGMENTARY IDENTITIES

This process of fragmented consumption separating, splitting up and dividing previously homogeneous groups such as, friends, the family, the neighborhood, the local community, the town, the county, the country and importantly, is often linked to the process of fragmented identity construction. 

Jean Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard describes as IMPLOSION which gives rise to what he terms SIMULACRA. The idea that although the media has always been seen as a representation of reality – a simulation, from Baudrillard’s perspective of implosion, it is has become more than a representation or simulation and it has become SIMULACRUM not just a representation of the real, but the real itself, a grand narrative

Habermas

He traces the decline in the public sphere identified already in this process through a range of societal shifts: the increased globalisation of economic trade, the transformation of citizens into consumers, the increase in digital communication technologies, the dominance of a small economic elite over global economic, political and cultural exchange

Orientalism

the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism

Edward Said

Jacques Lacan

 we cannot actually see ourselves as whole, we use a reflection to understand who we are / who we are not.

Louis Althusser: ISA’s & the notion of ‘Interpellation’

People are socially constructive

1. Assimilation of colonial culture corresponding to the ‘mother country’ Chinua Achebe talks of the colonial writer as a ‘somewhat unfinished European who with patience guidance will grow up one day and write like every other European.’ (1988:46)
2. Immersion into an ‘authentic’ culture ‘brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted’
3. Fighting, revolutionary, national literature, ‘the mouthpiece of a new reality in action’.

Antonio Gramsci – Hegemony

‘It is well known that Alhussser drew part of his inspiration from Gramsci’ (Althusser, 2016: xxiv) the way in which class relations and subject is ‘exercised through a whole set of institutions . . . the place where encounters between private individuals occur.’ (ibid)

However, Gramsci suggests that power relations can be understood as a hegemonic struggle through culture. In other words, 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, usually in line with the dominant ideas, the dominant groups and their corresponding dominant interests. In terms of postcolonialism Said, notes how ‘consent is gained and continuously consolidated for the distant rule of native people and territories’ (1993:59).

Paul Gilroy

Suggests that we need to become interested of how the governmental dynamics of the country has responded to the change and tells us about the place of racism in contemporary political culture.

W.E.B de Bois

Double consciousness

Suggested that people are not of one of ethnicity if they only live there and are of their past cultures which combine.

Orientalism- looking at other cultures and their stereotyped identities made by communities.

Louis Althusser- theory of interpelloation. role models create/ construct children identities

Systemic Societal Sexism?

Open this link to reflect on how (arguably) the most powerful position in the world – The President of the United States, talks and thinks about women. This would be known as MISOGYNY. This is a term that derives from psychoanalysis and essentially means a fear and hatred of women, or put simply: SEXISM, a mechanism used by males as a way of exerting power and control in society, otherwise known as PATRIARCHY.

Institutional sexism in buisnesses, communities and societies

individual sexism

The waves of feminism

Wave 1

• The suffragettes and suffragists

This period is often termed second wave feminism – after the first wave of feminism, which was galvanised by organisations such as, the British Women’s Suffrage Committee (1867), the International Council of Women (1888), the The International Alliance of Women (1904), and so on who, in early part of the 20th Century, worked to get women the right to vote.

Lara Mulvey

A good starting point, in terms of key concepts, is to look at the work of Laura Mulvey and specifically focus on her 1975 polemical essay: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema‘. Central to her thesis was the role of the male gaze, a theoretical approach that suggests the role of ‘woman as image, man as bearer of the look,’ in contemporary visual media.

Women are objectified and sexualised in cinema

Scopophilia is the pleasure of looking

Vouyerism is the pleasure gained in looking

Fetishism is when you focus on one particular aspect

dehumanising

Jack Le cam

theorises that when you’re born you don’t have a concious

The mirror stage/ when we recognize who we are

Toril Moi

As a final part of this brief introduction, it is useful to draw upon Toril Moi’s (1987) crucial set of distinctions between: ‘feminist’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’.

• Feminist = a political position
• Female = a matter of biology
• Feminine = a set of culturally defined characteristics

Raunch Culture – 3rd Wave Feminism

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, coined by Naomi Wolf, it was a response to the generation gap between the feminist movement of the 1960’s and ’70’s, challenging and recontextualising some of the definitions of femininity that grew out of that earlier period. In particular, the third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating a pluralism towards race, ethnicity, class, religion, gender and nationality when discussing feminism.

Plurality=many

Intersectionality: Queer Theory

Initial critical ideas that looked at the plurality of feminist thought can be found in the early work around Queer Theory. In the UK the pioneering academic presence in queer studies was the Centre for Sexual Dissedence in the English department at Sussex University, founded by Alan Sinfield and Johnathon Dollimore in 1990 (Barry: 141). In terms of applying queer theory to feminist critical thought, Judith Butler, among others expressed doubt over the reductionist, essentialist, approach towards the binary oppositions presented in terms of: male/female; feminine/masculine, man/woman. Arguing, that this is too simple and does not account for the internal differences that distinguishes different forms of gender identity, which according to Butler ‘tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes . . . normalising categories of oppressive structures‘ (14:2004).

There’s more power to individuals

How are you gonna organise the time and what’s it gonna do in your video?

In video there is a: Beggining, a middle and an end.

Time can be linear: sequential: non sequential or chronological

You can change space that isn’t natural or normal.

Whats the theme of the video?

In a narrative there is a story, theme and a plot

Tztevan Tadorov (Tripartite narrative structure) (theorist)

• Equilibrium
• Disruption
• New Equilibrium

Preytag (theorist)

• Expositon
• Climax
• Denouement

Vladimir Propp (Character types and function)

• what roles are there and how can it be shown

Stages of a story

• Preperation
• Complication
• Transference
• Struggle
• Return
• Recognition

Claude Levi-Strauss (Binarry oppositons)

one thing that connects societies together is stories from ancient cultures.

Binarry oppositions= e.g Agree-Disagree or good-bad

Seymour Chatman: Satellites and Kernels

• Kernels= Key moments in the plot/ Narrative structure
• Satellites= Embellishments, developments and aesthetics

His theory was about how in a narrative how it breaks down into two parts which are essentially what make up the story

Plan

These are some style models that I will base my advert On for my coursework, I will follow the models carefully so I get a believable, real looking advert.

Hans, Gurevitch and Katz (1973)

The theory is that there are two different needs of the public: Personal needs and Social Needs.

Personal needs are for a specific individual. These can be for one to understand themselves, Enjoyment and Escapism.

Social needs are for needs of everyone in the public who have similar views which makes them a discourse community. This can be knowledge about the world, self ability, awareness and self esteem, to strengthen bonds with family and friends.

DEMOGRAPHIC/PSYCHOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION:

Demographic: A socio-economic classification developed by the NRS (National Readership Survey)

Psychographic: A Psychographic Model of consumer behaviour used in the media industry to define audience segments.

Links into Maslows theory!