Section A Q1b: Level 3 Answer - Genre

1b)
Genre is often used as a way of distinguishing one style from another; it categorises works so that the audience can more easily choose what they want to experience. For my music video, the genre of our music was a hybrid of electropop/rock/dance, which come mostly from the original song and from our personal tastes. Since our genre is modern and not common, we drew conventions from artists that had similar styles to ours. The conventions we found for music video for our genre are; editing often cuts to the beat; for female artists – costumes are bold, they wear high heels, ands the performances are strong and full of attitude. Examples of artists’ videos that do this are Beyonce (through her powerful dance routines and sexy costumes) and Lady GaGa (who wears extreme hair, costume and makeup).
My music video consisted of my group members (4 girls) giving powerful performances with sections of dance routine. We stuck to these conventions because we wanted the audience to recognise it as belonging to a genre and looking back at it now I think we succeeded. The genre has postmodern influences as does our video. It starts with a short narrative to no music, where a girl looks at a picture in a locket of her and a guy, slams it shut and looks in a mirror – which transports her into ‘subconscious mind’. We filmed the bulk of our video in an all-white studio and with our powerful costumes that intertextually referenced the deadly sins and Marie Antoinette the audience can quite clearly see that it is not reality.
You can see that our video promotes strong women by their feisty performance and this is emphasised by the use of a male, white headless, mannequin with a ‘perfect’ torso. In the video the sins are corrupting the girl (but they are all just facets of her personality) and they dominate the mannequin. This is in contrast with Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘Male Gaze’ whereby media is predominantly made with a male or masculine audience in mind. Our target audience is 14-25 year old women, and this is obvious because the audience immediately identify with the main girl since she is the focus of the narrative and on the mannequin’s torso is a kiss mark, showing the women ‘marking their territory’ on him. If we were targeting men we would’ve used a real man, but by our production decisions the target audience and genre is clear.
We followed the convention of cutting shots to the beat, however we challenged the convention of keeping lines of the song in one shot. We cut midway through words and phrases in order to quicken the pace, which is often fast for this genre. An aspect of the genre which we developed is comedy. In some of the music videos artists take themselves very seriously, however we combined the sexy performances with the comic editing and cut aways to five the characters a ‘human feel’ in the make believe
world. For example we used what was originally going to be an outtake, where one girl shakes her bum from side to side, and we matched it to the beat, giving it a comic edge.
You can apply Lyotard’s theory of mete-narratives to our video since it blurs the lines between reality and fantasy using the key signifier of a mirror in the opening narrative.
I think the my music video successfully conveys its genre while still maintaining enigma. The Reception Theory can be applied, since from feedback, many people had different interpretations, which is what this genre is all about. Looking at it objectively I would say that it is a fun, interesting video that invites playability and successfully promotes the song, which is the aim of a music video.



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