Key words:

• Media concentration / Conglomerates / Globalisation (in terms of media ownership) – globalisation is the process by which businesses develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. A conglomerate is a corporation that is made up of a number of different, sometimes unrelated businesses. In a conglomerate, one company owns a number of smaller companies all of which conduct business separately and independently.
• Vertical Integration & Horizontal Integration – In a horizontal integration, a company takes over another that operates at the same level of the value chain in an industry. A vertical integration, on the other hand, involves the acquisition of business operations within the same production vertical.
• Gatekeepers – they craft and conduct what is being published to the masses, therefore they determine what is to become the public’s social reality, and their view of the world . People who hold the power to open the gate to for things they allow eg Roger Ailles fox news.
• Regulation / Deregulation – Media regulations are rules enforced by the jurisdiction of law, guidelines for media use differ across the world. Deregulation is when the government reduces or eliminates restrictions on industries, often with the goal of making it easier to do business.
• Free market vs Monopolies & Mergers – The free market is an economic system based on supply and demand with little or no government control. Monopolies are cross ownership eg, ownership of different kinds of media (TV, newspapers, magazines, etc.)
• Neo-liberalism and the Alt-Right
• Surveillance / Privacy / Security / GDPR

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the close study products ‘ghost town’ and ‘letter to the free’ in your answer.

Narrative theory is useful in analysing music videos to gain an idea about the storyline, message and plot that the media is trying to portray. Todorov’s narrative theory consists of a three part structure, an equilibrium, disruption and new equilibrium (beginning, middle and end).

These can be used to analyse the letter to the free music video which focuses on the black community and the multi-media Netflix documentary about American prisons being filled by black people. The letter to the free video shows a symbolic square box which common explains that it represents blackness not being defined in time or space. This box appears throughout the video structure as a satellite, which in Seymour Chatman’s theory means it is not essential to the narrative but are helpful and in this instance, it is helpful to provide the meaning behind the video. While the black box is shown at points throughout the video, it is shown before the song starts and then at the end of the video it is the last thing you see. This relates to Todrov’s theory as the video is structured in a way that leaves a significant beginning, middle and ending that highlights the main message of the video.

The Claude-Levi Strauss theory about binary opposites could apply to the narrative of letter to the free, assuming the audiences ideological stances are agreeing with the dominant ideology, being that racism is still prominant in modern day. These opposites could be good vs bad or black vs white. For example in the lyrics ‘Shot me with your ray-gun And now you want to trump me Prison is a business, America’s the company’. This is common directly speaking to the opposing side. This helps us understand the narrative as these binary opposites act as codes for us to identify and decode.

In the Ghost Town music video, the narrative shows the band travelling in a car through empty roads, highlighting a time in the uk where there were riots, deindustrialization and unemployment which caused the feel of a ‘ghost town’. Throughout the video, the band are together in the car which represents them being isolated. This relates to the narrative theory as the beginning shows shots of urban buildings which introduces a theme of industrialisation, it then shows a point of view from the car driving and the view of the empty roads. These beginning shots are useful to identify the setting and the theme of the music video right at the beginning, which then sets the mood for the rest of it. The ending shows a contrast to the disruption, which is chaos with the camera spinning. Whereas, the last shot is still which shows the group throwing rocks into water. This contrast is useful as it shows a clear structure of narrative.  

There are a use of satellites and kernels in the video too. The wide shots of the location and empty roads portray the message of an isolated, gloomy ‘ghost town’ and therefore have an important role of conveying the meaning to the audience. Satellites in this video could something less essential like the make of the car the band is driving.

Theoretical idea that helps us to understand the times we are living in now and what we are doing now. Postmodernism is characterised by re imagining, PASTICHE, PARODY, COPY, BRICOLAGE. It is not worrying about the meta-narrative which are deep questions (eg why we are here) but just focusing on whats going on in the moment. Postmodernism suggests we dont know whats real anymore eg Memento: ‘facts are more important than memory’. Unable to distinguish fiction from reality.

The film is a rearrangement of unconnected signs.

We live in a post modernist culture. Eg tiktok being superficial.

Self referentiality means always referencing itself. In memento we see the same things over and over again.

pastiche is a work of art, drama, literature, music, or architecture that imitates the work of a previous artist.

parody is a work or performance that imitates another work or performance with ridicule or irony

Memento is characterised with Intertextuality such as surface signs, gestures & play

For example in memento his body is filled with tattoos which are signs.

BRICOLAGE is 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’ (Barker & Jane, 2016:237). 

Narrative is the overall structure involved in communication, which can be broken down into: ‘story’ and ‘plot’.

Enigma codes: create puzzles and questions within the narrative which is what memento does throughout. these codes are used to create an active audience.

elision or elipsis: this means, in terms of time, to cut things out. for example if someone is burning a book the audience does not want to see the whole thing being burnt, it would take too long.

Use Foreshadowing, flash forwards and flash backs in essays.

Dramatic irony: when we know something the character does not.

Parallel or simultaneous narratives: two narratives running at the same time eg, in memento the black and white parts and the parts in colour.

Mix of light and shade: heavy stuff eg gore and murder vs jokes or moments of love

non-sequitars: a storyline that went nowhere, eg the women in the toilet in hotel room. These create mystery/enigma that lead nowhere. These are useful as they add more interesting and entertaining parts to the plot.

Vladimir Propp (Character Types and Function):

Each has a function that contributes to the narrative.

1. Hero
2. Helper
3. Princess
4. Villain
5. Victim
6. Dispatcher
7. Father
8. False Hero

Tztevan Todorov (Tripartite narrative structure):

• Equilibrium (beginning)
• Disruption (middle)
• New equilibrium (end)

movie notes:

black and white

flash forward in the beginning and the sound of gunshot

memory condition-writes notes

flashbacks of his wife tell story

Specifically looking at identity and representation through the lens of Empire and Colonialism. From the perspective/lense of the Atlantic slave trade.

ORIENTALISM – Edward Said’s theory

Orientalism is the imitation or depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. These depictions are usually done by writers, designers, and artists from the West. “the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming or emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism” Edward Said Culture and Imperialism, 1993. ‘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’ V. G. Kiernan.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience . . . One of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’. So what is the ‘Other’? – looking at the other in terms of race. For example stereotyping races.

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

Ideolgical State Apparatus – s a theoretical concept developed by (Algerian born) 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. So, your family and friends etc influence your values.

in other words – He said ISA’s (ideological state apparatus) is what makes us, us, in society. It is a structure that we are in which is full of ideas values and beliefs. These things construct who we are as individuals so that we become a certain person. This could be your friends, school, the government, they all shape our beliefs and make us stuck there.

Hegemonic struggle (Gramsci) is the chance to reclaim. Imagine a tug of war between your own identity and what other people are telling you. 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).

Frantz Fanon

In terms of postcolonialism, we can look at a book called 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. Fanon was born in the French colony of Martinique and appears to recognise the ‘mechanics of colonialism and its effects of those it ensnared‘ (McLeod 2000:20) when he remembers how he felt when, in France, white strangers pointed out his blackness, his difference, with derogatory phrases. People in France saw him as a black stereotype and through the lease of empire.

Fanon presents three phases of action/plan ‘which traces the work of native writers’:

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’. 

Syncretism, double consciousness & hybridisation

mechanisms for understanding cross-cultural identities.

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.’ (2004:13) His theme of Double Consciousness, derived from W. E. B. Dubois, involves ‘Black Atlantic’ striving to be both European and Black through their relationship to the land of their birth and their ethnic political constituency.

Jaques Lacan:

Theory: first time a baby looks in a mirror, this moment is called ‘the mirror phase’

This applies to representation, when black people look at tv and film, they don’t see themselves, lack of representation in the media. Television in the 1970’s represented and used ethnic minorities as the joke and often made fun of them saying they were stupid or couldn’t understand english.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said, points out that ‘the Orient has helped to define Europe (Or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience . . . One of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other’. So what is the ‘Other’? – looking at the other in terms of race. For example stereotyping races.

Misogyny: is defined as hatred of women or girls, expressed as disgust, intolerance or entrenched prejudice, serving to legitimate women’s oppression.

Patriacrchy: Patriarchy is a social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. 

Sexism from an institutional perspective and at an individual level. Looks at groups, organisations.

Feminism: critical articulation for equality. Four waves of 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.

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

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. She argues that females are looked at and males are the lookers.

Scopophilia (‘taking people as objects and subjecting them to a controlling and subjective gaze‘ ie OBJECTIFICATION); another is vouyerism (the sexual pleasure gained in looking); another is fetishism, the way in which parts of the female body are presented as something to be ‘looked at’ and therefore ‘objectified‘ and ‘sexualised‘ which is dehumanising as they become objects and not people. ‘close-ups of legs . . . or a face‘, of lips, hips, bums, tums, thighs, legs and breasts, etc. etc) which are exaggerated through cinematic conventions of ‘scale’, ‘size’, ‘focus’.

Sut Jhally‘s work at the Media Education Foundation, draws a connection between the aesthetics of pornography and the codes and conventions of the music video.

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. Eg, a difference between a black woman’s experience and a white woman’s.

• an emphasis on the differences among women due to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion
• individual and do-it-yourself (DIY) tactics
• fluid and multiple subject positions and identities
• cyberactivism
• the reappropriation of derogatory terms such as ‘slut’ and ‘bitch’ for liberatory purposes
• sex positivity

Intersectionality: Queer Theory

Queer theory is a field of critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of the fields of queer studies and women’s studies. “Queer theory” can have various meanings depending upon its usage. Two common usages of queer theory include a 1) methodology for literary analysis and 2) a productive practice of theory.

Hook: Multicultural Intersectionality

As Barker and Jane note, ‘black feminists have pointed to the differences between black and white women’s experiences, cultural representations and interests’ (2016:346). In other words, arguments around gender also intersect with postcolonial arguments around ‘power relationships between black and white women’. So that ‘in a postcolonial context, women carry the double burden of being colonized by imperial powers and subordinated by colonial and native men’.

How useful are ideas about narrative in analysing music videos? Refer to the close study products ‘ghost town’ and ‘letter to the free’ in your answer.

Narrative theory is useful in analysing music videos to gain an idea about the storyline, message and plot that the media is trying to portray. Todorov’s narrative theory consists of a three part structure, an equilibrium, disruption and new equilibrium (beginning, middle and end).

These can be used to analyse the letter to the free music video which focuses on the black community and the multi-media Netflix documentary about American prisons being filled by black lives. The letter to the free video shows a symbolic square box which common explains that it represents blackness not being defined in time or space. This box appears throughout the video structure as a satallite, which in Seymour Chatman’s theory means it is not essential to the narrative but are helpful and in this instance, it is helpful to provide the meaning behind the video. While the black box is shown at points throughout the video, it is shown before the song starts and then at the end of the video it is the last thing you see. This relates to Todrov’s theory as the video is structured in a way that leaves a significant beginning, middle and ending that highlights the main message of the video.

In the Ghost Town music video, the narrative shows the band travelling in a car through empty roads, highlighting a time in the uk where there were riots, deindustrialization and unemployment which caused the feel of a ‘ghost town’. Throughout the video, the band are together in the car which represents them being isolated. This relates to the narrative theory as the beginning shows shots of urban buildings which introduces a theme of industrialization, it than shows a point of view from the car driving and the view of the empty roads. These beginning shots are useful to identify the setting and the theme of the music video right at the beginning, which then sets the mood for the rest of it. The ending then shows a contrast to the disruption, which is chaos with the camera spinning. Whereas, the ending is just one still shot which shows the group throwing rocks into water. This contrast is useful as it shows a clear structure of narrative.  

Postmodernism is a movement that focuses on the reality of the individual, denies statements that claim to be true for all people and is often expressed in a pared-down style in arts, literature and culture. An example of a thought of postmodernismis the idea that not all people would see stealing as negative.

• Pastiche – a pastiche is work that imitates other works but in a positive way.
• Bricolage – collection of works from a diverse range of things.
• Intertextuality – the relationship/connection between different texts and the influence of some texts to other texts. 
• Implosion – the sudden collapse of something inwards/ a sudden failure.
• cultural appropriation – 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. 

In this music video, the protagonist is the main focus as he walks with the camera following him. Even with things going in the background, the focus is on him. I like this idea of the camera following someone on a journey. This correlates with the idea of isolation and loneliness as there are no interactions with other people until the end. It is almost like the audience is viewing what it is like to be in their mind.

This music video has the same idea of exploring and walking through a setting. The camera shows close ups of them looking around the area.

In this music video, the protagonist stands out as they are isolated from the other people. Again I like the idea of the camera following them as they walk through streets like you are viewing their journey from their perspective.

The theme of isolation is shown here through the use of the camera angles spinning around her to show that she is the only one there. I like the fact that the camera is circling around her and the focus always being on her spreads a message of self reflecting and possibly loneliness.