Research - Types of Music Videos

A theory by Firth in 1998 states that all music videos can be placed into three seperate catorgories: Performance, Narrative and Concept. Whether on not this is now true remains to be seen but elements of each can be found in nearly all the music videos of today.

Performance
Perfomance type videos contain mainly elements of, obviously, permorming. This means that they often feature the band or the artist that performs the song, or else and actor or dancer that portrays them. Commonly, they contain frequent shots of the instruments being played or of the miming of lyrics, meant to feel as if the artist is performing the song for the video.

Pure Performance Examples:

 

Parachute - Kiss Me Slowly ... A pure performance based music video, focusing on the band playing the song. Perhaps it is meant to replicate a concert experience or possibly create more of a personal connection between band and audience. Many close up shots are used, along with sweeping panning shots to capture the full band with all memebers. However, another convention of music video, slow motion, is notably absent here.

 

 

Beyonce - Single Ladies ... A music vidoe that is slowly becoming quite iconic. The whole video is singularly of the artist plus dancers performing, with only a few subtle nods in the routine to the lyrics. It's also in black and white, making it look even more simple. Interestingly, no slow motion is used here either, leading me to believe that perfomance based music videos often don't use it, a possible reason for this being the directors intentions of keeping the performace as "live" looking as possible.

 

Narrative

Videos such as these follow a set storyline that usually match directly to the lyrics and follow set characters. These character may either be the artist or actors portraying others ky to the story line. They tend to use many slow motion shots along with slow pans and close up shots, once again features many music video conventions.

 

Pure Narrative Examples:

 

 

Taylor Swift ft. Ed Sheeran - Everything Has Changed ... This works perfectly as an example of a narrative based music video, containing no element of performance at all. The children in the video either represent the artists at a younger age or, as revealed in the end of the video, play young relatives or their children. It captures the idea of the songs title whilst also fitting to many music video conventions, re introducing slow motion.

 

 

Jay Malinowski - Life is a Gun ... A music video we looked at in class. The story is highly related to the lyrics, a key convention of narrative based songs and videos and contains no performance element. It also follows the same black and white colour style, an idea that can later be linked to the lyrics.

Concept
This refers to a random idea which often does not relate to lyrics or song meaning. Concept videos often make the audience question what they are really about and fit to the sound of a song.

Pure Concept Examples:

 

OK Go - Here it Goes Again ... This was by far the hardest to find are video for. Many concept videos often contain some performance at the very least, an example of how the lines between these genres are slowly becomning blurred. The Treadmill idea is part of the video simply for the reason that it is interesting to watch. The idea itself has no real link to the lyrics but perhaps it can be fitting to the sound of the song.

 

The blurring of the lines between the types...

 

Firths theory was originally developed in 1998, a time when the idea of music videos were still developing and boundries ahd yet to be pushed. Whilst in the early years of vidoes these types were certainly kept to, artists striving to be creative and innovative began merging the three to create something entirely new. Now, it is resonably rare to find a video that does not contain at least two of Performance, Narrative and Concept and it is extremely hard to find pure versions of the video types.

 

For example, I Want Crazy b y Hunter Hayes uses a little of all three. Whilst the majority of the video is based around a narrative, there are frequent scenes of the artist performing the song, guitar in hand. There are also vague concept ideas placed within the narrative that have little to do with the lyrics or song. This type of video has become the norm these days and the lines can only continue to blur further.