Narrative in Music Videos

A narrative is a spoken or written account of connected events which make a story line. 

Narratives in music videos can be alike films in that there has been a distinct plot and characters acting to reflect the lyrics and genre of the song. However, not all music videos has these distinct plots or styles as some may decide to defy narratives to try and be more creative and engage the viewer more. An observation that has been made with narratives of a music video is that they don't follow the style of classic Hollywood films, giving them their own styles and individuality. 

In class, we looked at the music video for Meatloaf - I'd Do Anything: 

After watching the music video for Meatloaf - I'd Do Anything, I noticed that this video doesn't follow a simple, straightforward narrative and leaves a lot of loose ends - keeping the viewers questioning aspects of the video such as the relationship between the characters and the reason for why the police is chasing them. Alike most music videos, this displayed a combination of both narrative video and performance from the artist - jumping from past to present. 

Aerosmith - Crazy was also a music video that we watched. 

From what I gathered from watching this video, again, there was a mixture of narrative and performance which gives me the impression that this is the more popular choice when producing the music videos. Another observation that was made was that the lyrics had been infused in to the narrative with the use of the car radio and clubs, with the characters mouthing the words - mirroring the performance side of the video. 

Finally, we watched the music video for Prodigy - Smack My Bitch Up. 

Compared to Meatloaf and Aerosmith, the music for Prodigy - Smack My Bitch up had differentiated itself with a different style of showing the narrative of the music video. To start with, they did this by having the music video as a constant narrative with a clear plot of a wild night out by filming the whole thing with a point of view technique. This allows the viewer to experience the night through the character, enabling them to feel as part of the music video and appreciate the genre of the music more. Prodigy also used the music from a stereo and nightclub to embed the track 'Smack My Bitch Up' in to the music video.  

Personally I preferred the music video for 'Smack My Bitch Up' mainly due to the fact that the whole video was a narrative where as the other two had sections of performance which is what I would like to include in my music video. As well as that I would prefer to have a song without many/any lyrics so that the video doesn't have to stick to any sort of specific narrative to match the lyrics - giving an opportunity to be creative with our video and reflect the style of music as much as possible. A clear story line in the narrative would be preferred and opposed to the Meatloaf song as that left a lot of loose ends and I found it confusing to try and follow.