Seminal video using Goodwin's theory

Goodwin’s Theory

In his book ‘Dancing in the distraction factory’ Andrew Goodwin identifies the following features of music videos:

• There's a relationship between lyrics and the visuals
• There's a relationship between the music and the visuals, the lyrics  (e.g. sad song with sad lyrics and vice versa)
• Some music genres may have their own music videos style and iconography (e.g. hip-hop with girls, cars and gold jewelry)
• There is often a demand for a lot of close-ups of the main artist or vocalist from the record company to establish the artist on screen and identify them with the music
• Likely to be a reference to voyeurism (notion of looking) usually for females but also in the methods of actually looking (e.g. screens within screens or cameras
• Likely to be intertextual references either to other music videos (usually to seminal videos) or to films and TV texts

Overall, I feel that when constructing my music video, I didn’t want a stereotypical video that showed teens going out to explore the world, I wanted to represent youth in an opposing way to which they may be represented at this moment in time, a perception of youth now days is connected to drink and drugs, which may be fun for them at the time, but from outside their perspective, others may see this as bad. This may fit with the house genre life, as the people who enjoy this music may live happy and energetic life. I did include Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, describing it as characters being ‘bearers of the look’ which is usually aimed at ‘physically desirable’, sexually submissive female characters. I challenged this through using a ‘physically desirable’ male protagonist. Although I did not show off the man’s body, he was given a ‘voyeuristic look’, so was still exposed to the camera, so the audience could gaze at him. I did this through several close up shots, showing off his attractive male features, enjoying himself which may be attractive to people.