TEN TIPS: PETE FRASER

Ten tips for...

making your own music video

Two or three years ago, Pete Fraser wrote a piece for the very first issue of MediaMag with tips for students on making a music video – probably the most popular task for OCR A2 coursework. Since then, changes in technology have led to some opportunities to help make your music video project even better... Here he is again with an update.

Step 1: Choose a track
Ideally your track will be provided by your teacher as part of a selection for the whole class to select from. The most successful choices are usually unknown or semi-unknown artists. It is rare that moderators see work featuring tracks by very well-known stars; often choosing your favourite track or favourite artist leads to self-indulgent work.

MySpace is a good source of material; if you (or a teacher) search by genre, you can quickly find a range of stuff. You could even search by genre and by geographical area to give yourself the opportunity to find local bands who might even be prepared to appear in the video.

Make it short! Tracks that last five minutes rarely make good videos. It becomes very hard work to sustain the audience’s attention for more than three minutes and it means an awful lot of planning, shooting and editing. A really well edited two-minute video can earn much better marks than a long video which contains lots of padding.

Step 2: Write a treatment
In your group, listen to the track several times and discuss the ideas that it generates. Don’t just go with the lyrics – look to them to provide a springboard for ideas and soak up the atmosphere of the track. Write a pitch for the material with a strong and simple idea.

Have a clear concept which is workable! Don’t try to include too many different ideas – the more complicated you make it, the more can go wrong.

Step 3: Plan for everything
Storyboard – you can always shoot extra material but you need a very clear plan for what you are going to shoot so that no time is wasted when you get there. Plan people, places, props and costumes. Arrange every detail like a professional producer would.

Get everyone’s mobile numbers! You need to be able to contact one another easily. Aim to shoot it early, not up against deadline when something will always go wrong; if you are ahead of the game, you will avoid the problems turning into disasters.

Make sure your performers have rehearsed and know the words; it can be very embarrassing to watch something where the singer doesn’t know the words and it can ruin all your hard work elsewhere in the planning, shooting and editing. It’s part of the director’s job to motivate, so make sure your performer is motivated!

Step 4: Set up a blog
This is a fantastic way of enhancing your planning. You can use it to link to videos that influence you from YouTube, to the performer’s MySpace and to any photos that give you ideas. Take recce shots on location and post them onto your blog; put up pictures of props, costumes, instruments. The advantage is that you can add to this planning from any computer and every member of the group can contribute.

Look at relevant real examples – choose tracks from the same genre to give a sense of what the conventions are, not just great famous videos which may be impossible to emulate.

You can also do an animatic of your storyboard, where you film each of your drawings (however rough) and then capture your shots in the edit program before adding the music. This then gives you the opportunity to see how well your planning, and particularly the storyboard, is likely to work in practice. You may well find that the shot of the band you thought would look great will be revealed as lasting much too long when put with the music, indicating the need to cut the whole thing faster and re-think the storyboard. You can then upload your animatic to YouTube and paste it into your blog for feedback from others.

In effect, your blog becomes a place for all your ideas and the development of your planning as an e-scrapbook and something which can be submitted to the moderator as evidence for your planning marks.

Step 5: Know your equipment
Do test shots to try out effects. Check any quirks that the camera has; it is much better to find out before you go on the shoot than when you get back. You may need to check things like how to avoid the camera switching to widescreen mode. Do you know the edit program well enough for the things you intend to do? Experiment before the main thing!

When you do go out on your shoot, make sure you have the tripod and the attachment to fix the camera to it. Have you checked that the tape is loaded? Have you got the CD and player? If you don’t have it playing out loud on the shoot, you will find it very difficult to synch up the sound in the edit stage.

Step 6: The shoot
Make sure your location is useable for your purpose. If you are going to have passers-by going through the frame all the time, is that going to mess up your video? If you are on a stage, is it going to look convincing?
Shoot the performance at least three times with different set-ups. More, if possible, as this way you give yourself more options in the edit. Don’t forget: lots of close-ups! Shoot some of the performances with moving camera, handheld, whatever, otherwise it can end up looking pretty static. Make sure you have plenty of cutaways, experiment with extra angles and lighting changes.

Enthuse your performers – they must give it plenty! But overall, shoot more than you think you will need – there will always be shots you don’t like when you come to edit.

Step 7: Capture your footage
Label everything you capture so that you don’t have lots of files all called ‘untitled’ or just with numbers. Label by description for example, ‘close-up singer good 1’ to make it easy to find. Break it into manageable chunks, no longer than the full length of the song itself, and be selective! Don’t capture stuff you don’t need or which is obviously rubbish footage as you’ll fill up your computer unnecessarily and give yourself too much material to wade through.

Step 8: The edit
Synch up performances first and aim to get the whole picture rather than tiny detail. There is a risk of spending far too long on little moments of the video and never getting the whole thing finished: getting a rough cut which comprises just the performances intercut with one another should be an early target. Aim for a dynamic piece of work, which moves along at a pace. Cut and cut again – it’s rare that shots feel too short but common to see videos where shots drag on...

Upload a rough cut to YouTube and your blog and get feedback; it will also enable you to trace back your decisions when you come to the write up.

Do any effects work last, such as greenscreen or adding motion paths. This could be several hours work, so leave plenty of time to complete it.

Step 9: Screening
Hopefully you will have the chance for a big-screen premiere of your work at a local cinema which many schools and colleges now negotiate, but at the very least your work will be shown in class for feedback. Get feedback wherever you can and note it all down.

Upload your finished video to your blog via YouTube and look out for feedback there. Get the artist to look at it, to put it on their MySpace and give you feedback.

Step 10: Analysis
Unlike the real world of the promo director, you’ll have to write about it. Take advice about what is needed in your write up and start early. Get help with drafts of writing – get teachers to read it and comment, give it to parents or friends to help you proofread.

Make use of your blog – use it to remind you of the process and all the stages you went through.

Pete Fraser teaches at Long Road 6th Form Centre, and is Chief Examiner for OCR Media Studies A Level.

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 19.

THE DETROIT COBRAS

It goes like this

You Media students – and almost everyone else under-45 – like music videos; you’ve grown up with them. You love watching them and you love making them for your practical projects. Natasha Hewitt and Sean Kaye-Smith find The Detroit Cobras’ ‘Cha Cha Twist’ a particularly rich – and fun – text.

Who and what are ‘The Detroit Cobras’?
The Detroit Cobras – championed in the U.K. in recent years like so much vibrant new music by the late lamented Radio One D.J. John Peel – are part of Detroit’s recent music renaissance, perhaps most significantly publicised and epitomised by the success of Jack and Meg White: namely The White Stripes. Whilst nothing will ever eclipse the wonderful legacy of Mo(tor)town, Detroit is now once again something of a ‘happening’ place.
Interestingly The Detroit Cobras are essentially a ‘covers’ band (i.e. they do other artists’ material rather than writing their own); but there are two different types of covers bands.
– Firstly, those who try to reproduce the sound of the original artists as faithfully as possible, and nowadays many bands doing this are likely to have taken that extra step of becoming a ‘tribute’ band, concentrating on one particular band from the past (e.g. The Beatles) and trying to reproduce their look as well as their music.
– Secondly, there are those covers bands which do material that they themselves have not written but which they perform in their own very personal and unique way, so that they are interpreters of the material (of course this is what Frank Sinatra spent most of his time doing!).
The Detroit Cobras are firmly of the latter variety and, interestingly, their choice of material reflects their interest in some of the less well-known names in soul and rhythm and blues history, so it is likely that most music fans will hear The Cobras’ version first before trying to track down the original recordings. Their take on Hank Ballard’s ‘Cha Cha Twist’ is supported by a stylish and entertaining video which is, in some ways, fairly typical of music videos in general, but which is also quite an original and quirky text which throws up several popular cultural issues.
The downsides of music video
There are some convincing arguments against the ubiquitous music video, some of which are succinctly stated by David Stubbs in Wire magazine’s recent review of the compilation ‘Warp Vision (The Videos 1989-2004)’. Stubbs suggested that music videos have ‘helped remove the spectacle of performance from the popular sphere’. It is difficult to test this thesis, particularly as some music videos do feature the artists performing, albeit in a rather artificial ‘staged’ setting. However, if ‘performance’ is interpreted as acting and singing at the same time then the point gains weight: much of this performing seems little more than walking, sitting or laying around looking sad while mouthing the lyrics to the song. But Stubbs is surely right when he goes on to say that music videos have a certain ‘commodification of music’; they are essentially elaborate advertisements for songs, which carry the stamp of powerful corporations and are usually fashioned in the slick language of expensive promotion.
The high-cost element – most famously employed by some extremely high budget videos such as Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ – has cranked up the expense and, inevitably, hit the smaller companies and less high profile artists hard: competing with the budgets of Britney Spears, Robbie Williams and U2 puts smaller institutions in approximately the same position as Norwich City lining up to face Chelsea in the Premiership – all they can hope for is a ‘Big-Boys’ off-day and a lucky break.
But perhaps the most condemning criticism of the music video is that ‘it offers banal single interpretations of pieces of music, lazy comfort food for the eyes rather than stimulus to both the ears and the imagination.’
Whilst the end of the above quotation could arguably apply to much televised or film entertainment, the music video, without even the demands of dialogue or sophisticated narrative, seems a particularly easy target. When Henri Cartier-Bresson called television ‘chewing gum for the eyes’ was he prescient of Reality T.V. and the current wealth of music channels? Discuss!
With its two-dance name check (for younger readers there are dances of the 50s and 60s called the Cha Cha and the Twist) the song title suggests the video will feature a lot of movement. However, it opens quietly, unusually before the music starts, with the first part of a framing device; the camera moves down from the upper storeys of what appears to be a large department store at night to the ground floor window. This window scene is backlit in a vivid red light and broken by black silhouettes of the band, standing motionless like shop dummies. We are aware of the wet, shining pavement in front of the window as a figure walks left to right to place a coin through a slot in the wall on the right of the window. So the themes of consumerism and commerce are established early on with the store, the ‘goods’ the band represent and the coin slot, which, when fed, inevitably animates the band and the music starts. Coin slots are one of the greatest popular culture locations for creative consumerism. Think of jukeboxes, fairground and arcade games, drink machines, museum exhibitions etc. The consumer makes a choice, or makes something happen.
The Detroit Cobras come to life with the music and although the red background remains – and the black silhouettes do make further appearances – the musicians are now in colour. From this point on (not including the framing device) there are three main locations or viewpoints:
1. The band in silhouette (mainly brief, relatively static, shots).
2. The band in colour from inside the window.
3. Shots from the street with views of the pavement and the assortment of figures who congregate there, with the band performing in the window in the background. There is considerable variation in camera angle and movement in these shots.
It is night and we are in the street and into it comes a rich assortment of dancers – the nightlife. Some of these dancers are serious as their dress and movement clearly suggests; others have a more pantomime – or carnival – feel, such as a tiny-skirted and hooded Red Riding Hood (played, incidentally, by Meg White) with a lumbering bear-like wolf, which fails to trouble her at all or even to wipe the smile from her face. Sometimes the pavement is thronging like an outdoor disco; at other times there is a single figure to follow, such as a roller-skater who eventually does the splits. This melting pot of figures, costumes and movement and cultural themes could suggest a number of themes; how the street, noticeably devoid of authority figures (not a cop in sight) is a safe arena for a multitude of characters.
Bakhtin’s carnival
This is a good moment to introduce the work of Bakhtin whose ideas about ‘carnival’ and popular culture as carnival (perhaps most clearly rehashed in John Docker’s Postmodernism and Popular Culture) have had such a growing influence on media theory in recent years.
Bakhtin saw carnival as a ‘world-turned-upside-down’, when barriers of status, authority, class, law and culture were knocked down and the loud, iconoclastic energy of the fair took over. The band in this video are subservient to the audience, animated by them and for them to aid the audience’s self-expression through dance. There is plenty to explore here. ‘Cha Cha Twist’ is a very rich and open text which hopefully provokes very varied and imaginative responses.
The shots of the band which are mixed with these scenes in the street also raise some interesting issues, really giving us our money’s worth. Singer Rachel Naggy is the focal point of the band; she provides a fascinating contrast not only with the current batch of Kylies, Christinas and Britneys but also with the more ‘adult-orientated’ artists like Dido, Katie Melua and Amy Winehouse.
Ms Naggy is rumoured to be a former ‘exotic dancer’ and yet here she is modestly dressed – jeans, long-sleeved T-shirt – and does not dance at all. She sways a little, and raises her arms, but her mission is to sing, and her powerful rasping voice is much closer to pre-video artists like Etta James and Dinah Washington than to the artists mentioned above. Without doing very much, Ms Naggy is a powerful presence and an oddly compelling performer; yet this video does not promote her in the way that, say, a Britney Spears promo projects and commodifies its subject. The Detroit Cobras are a beat group with soul and rhythm and blues leanings, and very much a guitar band. Behind Ms Naggy three scruffy guys and the equally dishevelled Mary Resrepo are a fast-cut melee of hair and guitar iconography. The classic guitar shapes and shining colours and lacquers are in danger of stealing the show at times (we have a Fenderbass, an impressive semi-acoustic lead guitar and a smaller Gibson Les Paul style solid body). The persistence of the electric guitar in pop and rock music plugs bands like The Cobras into both rock history – or retro rock – and also contemporary bands like Busted and Franz Ferdinand. Guitars always look and a sound a bit surf, a bit punk, a bit metal, a bit Scottie Moore... and so the reservoir of associations continues to brim up.
At the end we return to the framing device. The band resume their position as motionless silhouettes, the street empties and the sounds of the city reassert themselves. A single figure walks back right to left this time; the carnival is over until the next night, or the next coin hits the slot.
Andrew Clifton has argued that film can be taught most effectively by studying ‘bad’ movies rather than ’great’ or classic films, i.e. it can sometimes be more useful and entertaining to explore why Fire Maidens from Outer Space is a terrible – but possibly fun – movie than to discover why Citizen Kane has topped the critics’ choice for the last forty years. You could use a similar approach with some music television, despite its large budgets and slick production values. But there are lots of good music videos – and The Detroit Cobras have given us one. We hope you’ll have an interesting and entertaining time with Cha Cha Twist and that it will perhaps inspire some successful, less clichéd practical work.

Natasha Hewitt and Sean Kaye-Smith.

This article was first published in MediaMagazine 13.

IMAX SALES UP 23%

IMAX reported sales up 23% to $56 million in the first three months of 2012, partly because of the strong opening of The Hunger Games in March The film made more than $10 million at IMAX screens.

STEVE ARCHER: HOW TO STUDY MUSIC VIDEOS

Music television 2 – how to study music videos

Following on from his article on MTV in MediaMagazine 6, Steve Archer suggests five essential criteria which should help you to evaluate whether that ultra-cool new video really does justice to the music, or whether it’s just a glorified marketing tool. And afterwards he and Pete Fraser present their top five music videos of all time.

Studying music video – some suggestions
Pessimists often complain that music video television has made pop superficially image-based. But my description of MTV and music video in MediaMag 6 failed to address what is still its most central and significant element, beyond the control of MTV, Viacom and Motorola: the appeal and power of pop sounds!

I’d like to suggest that the sounds are the basis of a process of visualisation that serve to enhance, not restrict, the original pop sound effect. Pop music theorist Andrew Goodwin claims that a good music video is:

a clip that responds to the pleasures of music, and in which that music is made visual, either in new ways or in ways that accentuate existing visual associations.
Dancing in the Distraction Factory

If we accept the theory that pop songs on their own are not enough to create sufficient meaning and pleasure in the audience, the ‘added value’ of star image created by CD covers, live performance and music videos can be enough to inspire the consumer to buy into the whole intensely romantic myth of it all – and therefore actually buy the pop music.

Certainly, the whole music business is sustained by the few star guarantees of profit in an unstable market. This maybe explains the somewhat fetishistic behaviour of fans who will buy the CD even if they can easily get the tracks for free on some P2P provider – we want all the packaging, the sacrosanct details in the booklet, the assurance it really belongs to us, not just the ‘stacking up’ of sounds that is the song itself. However, I am keen to keep these sounds as the primary pleasure and driving force of the music industry. This focus, therefore, is reflected in the order of my ‘Top Five Things to Look for’ when deciding if a music video is any good.

Five things to look for …
I’ve turned the ideas in Goodwin’s book, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, into checklist form for you to test out on the current crop of music videos.

At number 1 ... ‘Thought Beats’ or seeing the sounds in your head
The basis for visualising images comes from a psychological process called synaesthesia, where you picture sounds in your mind’s eye. This idea is absolutely central to understanding music video as they build on the soundtrack’s visual associations in order to connect with the audience and provide that additional pleasure.

To use this approach you need to start with the music, sorting out the way the song works, taking into account the way it has been stacked up with sound. To begin, lyrics don’t need to be analysed word for word like a poem but rather considered for the way they introduce a general feeling or mood. Very rarely do song lyrics have a coherent meaning that can be simply read off; but they are important in at least creating a sense of subject matter. So key phrases or lines (and especially those repeated in the chorus) will have a part to play in the kind of visuals associated with the song.

Here, Roland Barthes’ theory of the ‘grain of voice’ is relevant – this sees the singing voice more as an expressive instrument, personal, unique even, to the singer, like a fingerprint, and therefore able to create associations in itself. The voice of a song may even possess trademarks that work hand-in-hand with the star image – so Michael Jackson’s yelp is a trademark sound that immediately sets him apart from other singers.

Finally, if songs are stories, then the singer is the storyteller and this obviously makes music videos stand out on TV, as they feature a first person mode of address rather than the invisible ‘fourth wall’ of television narration. Goodwin interestingly compares pop singers to stand-up comics in the way the personal trademark or signature dominates the performance. The music – or arrangement of the song, including instrumentation, the mix and effects, including samples – generally works with the lyrics and grain of voice. Generally we can look at key sounds, like the tempo (or speed of the song) and structure of the song in terms of verse and chorus. To give an example of how instruments can create visual associations, the slow twang of the steel guitar could create geographically-based visual associations from the Deep South of the US – a desert plain, a small town, one road out, men chewing tobacco … We all share a memory bank of popular culture imagery (intertextuality), a sense of shared cultural history without which these references would make no sense. Places, people, feelings, situations leading to mini-narratives – all these can be summoned from the sounds of popular music.

These visualisations can arise from more personal, individual responses, sometimes even tied to a place or part of your own autobiography, the specific details of your life story and emotions. A combination of these shared and personal images tied to the words and instrumentation form the basis of music video creativity.

At number 2 … Narrative and performance
Songs rarely tell complete narratives; we are used to studying them with other visual texts like film. The narrative fuzz in songs affects the way stories are used in music video representations of a song’s meaning (see number 4 on page 22 for more on this). So, often we get the suggestion of a story, a hint at some kind of drama unfolding.

There is another important reason why music videos should avoid a classic realist narrative, and that is their role in advertising. Music videos need to have repeatability built in to them. We need to be able to watch them repeatedly in a more casual way, with a looser approach to their storytelling. I’d suggest that more important than narrative is the way that performance is used in video clips, a point I’ll look at again in number 3. Often, music videos will cut between a narrative and a performance of the song by the band. Additionally, a carefully choreographed dance might be a part of the artist’s performance or an extra aspect of the video designed to aid visualisation and the ‘repeatability’ factor. Sometimes, the artist (especially the singer) will be a part of the story, acting as narrator and participant at the same time. But it is the lip-sync close-up and the mimed playing of instruments that remains at the heart of music videos, as if to assure us that the band really can kick it. Remember that pop music is a romantic art, all about truth, talent, and magic, so we need to believe in the authenticity of the performance first and foremost (which is why, in their effort to win our respect and affections, we get so much eye-rolling, gesturing and sweat from the wannabes of Pop Idol and Fame Academy). The supposed individual and original qualities of these performers leads me to my next point, the source of all profit in the business … the star!

At number 3 … The star image
The music business relies on the relatively few big name stars to fund its activities; it usually fails to connect with popular audiences – only about one in ten acts put out by the industry actually makes any money. Therefore, what we can describe as the meta-narrative of the star image will have an important part to play in the music video production process. Meta-narrative is a term that describes the development of the star image over time, the stories that surround a particular artist.

Michael Jackson – a mini case study
Michael Jackson’s meta-narrative has been a long, sometimes difficult journey and one he has lost control of in recent years. There have been a few crucial moments in Jackson’s meta-narrative of pop stardom. The first was the successful move from being one of a group – even if acknowledged as its central talent – as child member of The Jackson 5, to becoming a solo artist. He was then able to negotiate one of the most successful solo careers ever through developing both his trademark sound and image. The ground-breaking music videos for Thriller and Beat It were an important part of this mega-stardom. At some point in the 90s, though, this meta-narrative took a wrong turn and his unique ‘star image’ became ‘freakish’ and self-indulgent; we are reminded that this child star has never grown up. Thus, the Jackson talent, his natural birthright it seems, becomes the reason for his adult weirdness. His younger self – black, funky, energetic – is constantly held up to condemn his current abnormality – withdrawn, of no ethnicity, over-produced to the point of ceasing to exist. And yet, all this means he is still talked about, the object of mass media fascination and so, in a very real sense, still a star. Whether the most recent allegations of child abuse will finally render that stardom invalid remains to be seen.

Meta-narratives of star image are not simply a matter of manipulation, but a dialogue or negotiation of what the music business asserts about their star, and what we accept! Still, in each new video, Michael Jackson tries to regain control over his meta-narrative but he can’t just switch off all the different associations he’s accumulated during his career, whether good or bad. So music videos can best be seen as one of the most important ways that the image of the artist is ‘managed’.

At number 4 … Three ways in which music videos relate visuals to the song
We can identify three ways in which music videos work to support or promote the song. These are illustration, amplification and disjuncture and I find them extremely useful in attempting to generalise the effects of individual music videos.

• Music videos can illustrate the meaning of lyrics and genre, providing a sometimes over literal set of images. Here, then, is the most straightforward technique and the classic example of visualisation, with everything in the music video based on the source of the pop song.

• However, as with all advertising, the most persistent type of video adds to the value of the song. Amplification is seen as the mark of the true music video Auteur, the director as artist, and an increasingly common way to view music video creatives (VH-1’s Best 100 Videos clearly placed Spike Jonze in the Auteur category with his work always amplifying the original song’s meaning and effect, usually through surreal humour). Crucially, though, and what separates it from disjuncture, is the fact that amplification music videos retain a link with the song and work to enhance or develop ideas, rather than fundamentally changing them.

• Disjuncture is a term used to describe those music videos that (normally intentionally) seem to work by ignoring the original song and creating a whole new set of meanings. This is quite a radical technique and used by arty bands in order to assert their difference and originality. Usually, disjuncture videos of this type don’t make a lot of sense and may be based on abstract imagery. For example in Spike Jonze’s video for Daft Punk’s ‘Da Funk’ we see a man with a dog’s head and his arm in a cast walking round New York, ignored by all, with dialogue completely unrelated to the song itself. Sometimes though, disjuncture videos are just bad, ill-conceived and self-indulgent mistakes.

And finally at number 5 ... Technical aspects of music video
The last really essential aspect of music video to study is technical. This includes camerawork, movement and angle, mise-en-scène, editing, and sound. It is important to remember the more general features of music videos already mentioned when trying to work out the technical effects, especially those which are post-production, effects. Broadly, the technical conventions can be summed up as follows:

1. Speed! Speed is visualised by camera movement, fast editing (montage) and digital effects.
– Camera movement is often motivated by running, dancing and walking performers.
– Fast-cutting and montage editing creates a visually decentred experience necessary for music video consumption, with the images occasionally moving so fast that they are impossible to understand on first viewing and thus need to be viewed several times (repeatability).
– Post-production digital effects – a staple of music video where images can be colorized, multiple split screens appear, and so on, all to complicate and intrigue, providing pleasure again and again.

Not all camera movement is about speed though and some use slow pace through dissolves or static shots. This kind of editing – like Sinead O’Conner’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ – is striking and effective in setting the song apart from the hustle and bustle of most pop activity.

2. Meat! The meat of most music videos is the cut to the close-up of the singer’s face. This is because the voice is seen as the most important part of pop music.

3. Beats! Often, the video will try and represent the music through the use of the cut to go with the beat or key rhythm.

4. Lighting and colour may also be used to emphasise key moments in the song, using methods from lighting live performances for dramatic effect. Colour may be used to show a development in the song, going from colour to black and white or vice versa when the chorus comes in. Equally, any change in the mise-en-scène or camerawork can signal the same type of thing.

5. Mise-en-scène – obviously the setting for music videos is important, often to guarantee the authenticity of the clip rather than anything else. So mise-en-scène for many music videos is the concert hall or rehearsal room to emphasise the realness of the performance or the grit and practice that goes into attaining star quality. Increasingly, CGI is used, especially for dance songs, which don’t rely so much on being ‘real’ like rock, soul and rap acts.

Adverts or art – you decide
So, that’s it. Hopefully, I’ve emphasised how complex music videos are. It’d be nice to hear your views and analyses of individual music videos. What do you think? Art or ads? Soft porn (using mainly female fragmented body parts to attract the – mainly male – gaze, as Laura Mulvey suggested in 1975) or a genuinely romantic and even spiritual experience of star worship? For what it’s worth, I don’t really like MTV, I find it too repetitive and too narrow. But music videos themselves can be wonderful extensions of the song, adding ideas and pleasures on top of the primary wonder of popular music.
I do believe that sounds remain the source and proper focus of the industry, with images a necessary but less interesting accompaniment. Radio is better than music television, and music is better than radio. The success of all these different media together, along with the increasing influence of the Internet, make popular music the intriguing stew it is today. MM

Steve Archer

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 7, February 2004

Thirty Frames Per Second

Thirty Frames Per Second: The Visionary Art of the Music Video
Steven Reiss and Neil Feinman (Harry N.Abrams, New York, 2000)

 The music video has to be densely textured so that it can hold up over repeated viewings. It has to be edgy enough to be noticed, but palatable enough to satisfy the often divergent demands of the performer, the record company and the public (A.K.A. the lowest common demoninator).

A plot-driven narrative usually gets boring...knowing that their music vidoes are meant to be seen repeatedly,, most video directors prefer a denser, more abstract style to telling a simple story.

For Jim Farber (‘The 100 Top Music Videos’, Rolling Stone October 14 1993), ‘Video directors reprove what good film directors knew all along – that visuals can also be music. When excuted with élan, an edit becomes a backbeat, a crane shot a solo, a close-up a hook.’

THE MANIC STREET PREACHERS

Look here for a post introducing Heidi Peeters

Today we study an article from Media magazine about The Manic Street Preachers.

Music 4 real – studying the Manic Street Preachers

Biographer and journalist Paula Shutkever argues that the Manics’ music, personal history, influences and image make them an ideal band to study.

Six years ago, as a music journalist, I wrote the first biography of the Manic Street Preachers. Of all the artists I’ve written about professionally, the Manics are the ones who never cease to intrigue, fascinate, challenge and inspire me. They are as much a Media Studies student’s delight as a music lover’s companion and guide.

We spend around 25% of our time consuming music (consciously or sub-consciously), making it the biggest of all cultural or media forms. And yet it’s only been in the last fifteen years – almost as long as the Manic Street Preachers have been around – that the discipline of Media Studies at school, college and university has taken the study of music seriously. So, as the band put out their ‘Best of’ album, it seems an appropriate point to consider what they can offer us as an object of study.

One of the first people to write theoretically about popular music – in the 1930s – was a man called Theodor Adorno, who claimed that popular music produced industrially could never effectively challenge dominant meanings and values (ideologies). He may never have lived to watch Pop Stars or Fame Academy but he hated the ‘standardization’ of popular music which went ‘through the mill’ of an industry production process. Ironically, even Robbie Williams, who himself came to fame with the help of a manufactured boy-band (Take That), complains that pop music is too manufactured nowadays …

Fifty years after Adorno first wrote about popular music, four working-class boys from Blackwood, Wales, were growing up against a backdrop of political unease during the early 1980s. They began to discuss why the world was seemingly going crazy – from the IRA Hunger Strikers to the Miner’s Strike. As their ‘Best of’ album was released, the firefighters began their strikes and the world seemed to have come full circle. The Manics try to ‘break free’ through education, music and politics.

What’s in a name?
The Manic Street Preachers’ name itself suggests that the group wants to tell us something. The Manics were very influenced by a group of French intellectuals called the Situationists. The Situationists were members of an international movement founded in 1957; they wanted to break down the barriers between art and everyday life, between actors and spectators, between producers and consumers. They wanted people to live not as objects but as subjects (and makers) of history.

The Situationists aimed to reinvent everyday life by constructing disruptive situations, which would literally jolt people out of their boredom. They wanted to be the catalyst for a revolution and then disappear. Following much the same spirit, early in their career the Manics announced that they were going to make one album, become world-famous – and then split up. Later, when signing to the major label Sony, the band tackled upfront any potential accusations of selling-out. They had something to say, and they wanted to say it to as many people as possible and no independent label could support them to do that:

'We’ve never been the Trade Unionists of Rock, we know that we could never reach as many people as we wanted, unless it was on a major [label]. We were willing prostitutes'.

James Dean Bradfield (Raw, 1992)

Speaking out, not selling out
The Manic Street Preachers have covered the following controversial topics in their songs:
• the validity of American culture (‘Blackpool Pier’)
• the madness of caged animals (‘Small Black Flowers That Grow In The Sky’)
• the frightening mental illness of Tourette’s Syndrome (‘Symphony of Tourette’)
• great writers such as Sylvia Plath (‘The Girl Who Wanted To Be God’)
• forgotten heroes of war photography like Kevin Carter
• controversial pornography workers in ‘Little Baby Nothing’
• anorexia (‘4st 7lbs’).

In spite of their obvious successes, they continue to tackle difficult issues in their songs and in their public demonstrations. The Manics were the first Western group to play in Havana, Cuba, and have recently contributed to the NME’s ‘1 Love’ album to raise money for the War Child charity. From within the music industry confines, they have made music that makes a difference.

The Situationists were a strong influence on punk music, and are cited by the Manics. Like Punk, the Manic Street Preachers merged a massive mixture of styles and influences – the band are big readers and culture-vultures, and this shows in their songs and videos.

The Manic Street Preachers have placed Wales firmly on the musical map. By proudly displaying their identity with huge Welsh flag backdrops, and culminating most of their tours at home, the band have forced a London-focused music industry actually to seek out bands like The Stereophonics, Catatonia and Super Furry Animals whose music is full of their Welsh roots. Could an album sung in Welsh have hit the charts before the Manics appeared?

Analysing the Manics’ music
The Manic Street Preachers can be analysed on a number of levels. Their lyrics are textually rich (Richey Edwards’ early lyrics are a painfully personal self-examination of human fragility). Their songs are musically diverse (from accessibly pop – ‘Everything Must Go’ – to the uncomfortable ‘Holy Bible’) and they are politically hard to pin down – whose side are they on?

The Manics are often associated with the emotional pain of youth. In February 1995, Richey Edwards, guitarist and songwriter, walked out of a hotel the band were staying in, never to be heard of again. Despite numerous ‘sightings’, earlier this year Richey was legally declared dead. Richey was plagued with eating disorders, cut himself with knives, and drank too much. But he left the band – and us – with a platform on which to discuss the previously hidden issues he suffered from. With songs like ‘4st 7lbs’ (about anorexia) and the self-explanatory ‘Die in the Summertime’, which uncomfortably questions our role as consumers, we have no choice but to take their music seriously.

When Richey Edwards cut ‘4 Real’ into his arm live on air as a reaction to DJ Steve Lamacq’s questioning of their authenticity and truthfulness, he did more than simply harm himself. He made all of us, as music journalists at the time, question our own validity over the artists we were interviewing. For my own small part, I gave all the money I earned from writing their biography to a self-harm charity.

A well known cultural critic, Walter Pater, once said that ‘all art aspires towards the condition of music’ – he was so right. As I listen to over a decade of the Manic Street Preachers’ music on Forever Delayed, their greatest hits album, I can see more slogans illustrating the sleeve and more about the band’s roots. There are quotations from the architect Gaudi, Dennis Hopper the filmmaker and actor, George Orwell the writer, and even from Van Gogh’s suicide note – all reminding us of human suffering – and breaking down barriers between star and audience.

At first I thought the most poignant of all the quotations was from Pablo Picasso, the artist: ‘Art is the life that helps us understand the truth’. Then I turned it over to find the group telling us, ‘We invite everyone to question the entire culture we take for granted.’

When I hear such passionate beliefs wrapped up in equally ardent sounds and delivered through a mass medium like the music industry, I’m reminded of all of the reasons why music is such an important form to study. We can use music to make meaningful sense of the world, and bands like the Manic Street Preachers, help us to do so un-blinkered. MM

Paula Shutkever

This article first appeared in MediaMagazine 3, February 2003

THEODOR ADORNO

Theodor Adorno

Adorno (1903-69) argued that capitalism fed people with the products of a 'culture industry' - the opposite of 'true' art - to keep them passively satisfied and politically apathetic.
Adorno saw that capitalism had not become more precarious or close to collapse, as Marx had predicted. Instead, it had seemingly become more entrenched. Where Marx had focussed on economics, Adorno placed emphasis on the role of culture in securing the status quo.
Popular culture was identified as the reason for people's passive satisfaction and lack of interest in overthrowing the capitalist system.
Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.
False needs are cultivated in people by the culture industries. These are needs which can be both created and satisfied by the capitalist system, and which replace people's 'true' needs - freedom, full expression of human potential and creativity, genuine creative happiness.
Commodity fetishism (promoted by the marketing, advertising and media industries) means that social relations and cultural experiences are objectified in terms of money. We are delighted by something because of how much it cost.
Popular media and music products are characterised by standardisation (they are basically formulaic and similar) and pseudo-individualisation (incidental differences make them seem distinctive, but they're not).
Products of the culture industry may be emotional or apparently moving, but Adorno sees this as cathartic - we might seek some comfort in a sad film or song, have a bit of a cry, and then feel restored again.
Boiled down to its most obvious modern-day application, the argument would be that television leads people away from talking to each other or questioning the oppression in their lives. Instead they get up and go to work (if they are employed), come home and switch on TV, absorb TV's nonsense until bedtime, and then the daily cycle starts again. 


This article by David Gauntlett on his site www.theory.org.uk  can be found here
Select bibliography

• Adorno, Theodor W. (1991), The Culture Industry: Selected essays on mass culture, Routledge, London.
• Horkheimer, Max, & Adorno, Theodor W. (1972), ‘The Culture Industry’, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Herder and Herder, New York.
• ‘The Frankfurt School and the culture industry’ in Dominic Strinati (1995), An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, Routledge, London. [A good introduction].
• Jay, Martin (1973), The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950, Little, Brown; Boston.
• Wiggershaus, Rolf (1994), The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, translated by Michael Robertson, Polity Press, Cambridge.

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Links

• Adorno Trading Card at Theory.org.uk
• Adorno's writings on-line -- three articles by Adorno -- good value.
• Adorno -- article cheekily reproduced from book by John Lechte.
• See the Adorno links at Popcultures.com.
• See also: Yahoo's Anti-Television category.

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http://www.theorycards.org.uk/card07.htm