Andrew Godwin’s theory on music videos:

Andrew Goodwin’s interpretation on pop music videos in today’s society is that they don’t follow the traditional narrative analyse that pop videos used to use. This is because pop videos usually take a different approach to filming than films do.

So reasons for different narrative structure is that pop videos are built around the song itself, pop videos use the singer as a character apart of the video but also as the narrative as they are singing the song (or telling the story) and lastly the singer most of the time makes direct eye contact with the camera trying to make the views feel more involved with the performance.

A lot of the time, pop videos repeat scenes and images just as the song repeats lines and choruses, however this could be down to them using base tracks and you do when making a music video. But the way Andrew Goodwin interpreted it is that as a part of promoting the song and video it would be played on TV, radio and there might be a lot of advertising for it on TV tie-in making the song very familiar through repetition.

Sometimes the video gives the audience a visual pleasure or they take liking to it so much that it encourages repeating the viewing and therefore promotes the music even more. This is seen as the song going being the original meaning of visualisation.

There are three types of relations between songs and videos that is illustration is when the videos tell the literal story of the lyrics using dancing for example to express the feelings in the song. Amplification which is when the video introduces new meanings that do not contradict with the lyrics but adds a different perspective of how to look at the meaning of the song and lastly disjuncture, this is where there is no connection or very little connection between the lyrics and the video.

Pop videos nowadays have very recognisable features that tell them apart from other videos for example bright neon lights, dancing and so on. Another obvious feature that is used a lot would be the way woman are objectified and are presented to be there only for the male’s desire. They focus more on specific parts of a woman’s body to seduce the male viewers.

A last point would be videos that are made as soundtracks to a movie often use pictures or scenes from that movie and incorporate it in the music video to make an obvious connection. 

An example of Illustration:

An example of Amplification:

An example of Disjuncture:

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