MV RESEARCH - Summary of Conventions

1. A music video has music played over moving images, in length it is like a short film.
  - Can be live action or animated (Gorillaz) or a mixture (Madonna's Music)
 (can't really apply animated music videos)

2. Mostly music videos will be done for singles, but other songs can also have a music video and a single doesn't always necessarily need to have a music video released with it.

3. Either the music is sung to, there is lip-synching, or it isn't. When it is this can vary in how many times, can be very little like in Halsey's Colors, and the performer singing can be onscreen while not singing (or join in and out like in Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down and Lana Del Rey's High By The Beach). Or they can appear at the end after a narrative without them like in Kraftklub's Fenster (speed ahead)

4. However even when there is no singing, the sound will often dictate the editing. 
Relationship between the emotions and atmosphere conveyed by the music and the visuals.

5. Doesn't have to include the band, even sometimes when there is lip-synching, it can be done by a different actor playing a character (Cro's Easy)

6. The relationship between the content of the the lyrics and the visuals.

If it is a concept album there will be the same characters in the all the videos (David Bowie and even with Ivy Levan all four songs on an EP have a music video, some even refer to each other with flashbacks. Halsey has a concept album, see 9

7. What is appearing more and more are diegetic intros, outros and interludes.

8. Also some have the song played at the beginning or the end, this can be part of the diegetic intro/outro (Kendrick Lamar's Alright and DNA, Green Day at the beginning, Halsey's New Americana at the end)

9. If it is a solo artist then they will however often be central, they will be playing different characters, although some might be more or less the same, like with Lana Del Rey where she often is  a mysterious, love-lust, almost suffering, however someone like Halsey plays multiple characters in multiple times and locations (Badlands). Although with Hopeless Fountain Kingdom. Is Kendrick Lamar constantly playing himself, working-class rapper and (gangster) in urban locations

10. If the solo artist has a backing band, then they will often also be in the video, though the solo artist will be more visible (Backing band was in David Bowie's John I'm Only Dancing, The Jean Genie but not in Space Oddity and Life On Mars. In Life On Mars particular even though he had the same red hair colour, the song was of a different character, so his costume changed, he was much more solo then. 

11. However just like with backing bands, in normal bands even though it is supposed to be a "democracy", the lead singer will often be signified as the lead, even if for example he is not the writer like with Depeche Mode.
Example: In Suede's Beautiful Ones the entrance of the lead singer, Brett Anderson, is subtly built up by showing all the band members before he enters onto the screen and starts singing.

12. Like all media texts there will be intertextual references. to film, TV, literature, other music videos, both that was already in the lyrics and was not.
Goodwin marked this out as special for music videos. But didn't Kristeva say all media texts are linked? How is it then special for music videos? For even other media texts are referencing music videos nowadays, for example Ashes To Ashes's homage to Uptown Girl.

LITERATURE
- David Bowie's Look Back In Anger, based on Oscar Wilde's The Picture Of Dorian Gray (no links to the play by John Osborne)

FILM
- Robbie Williams's Millennium A sort of nostalgic celebration and parody of the early James Bond films like Thunderball and From Russia With Love 

TV
- Sia's Cheap Thrills Referencing the origin of music video ironically, the narrative is like old music shows American Bandstand and The Buddy Deane Show

13. Genre characteristics, Goodwin said they are linked to the music genres, he said there had been too much focus by theorist on applying genres of film, television and literature. 
Electronic Dance Music, conventional emphasis on dance.
However, genres from film and TV that have their origins in literature can be found in music video:

Zombie: Michael Jackson's Thriller, Bring Me The Horizon's Follow You, Kraftklub's Fenster
Sci-Fi: Katy Perry's E.T.
Dystopia: David Bowie's The Heart's Filfthy Lesson, Kraftklub's Fenster, Halsey's New Americana (the whole album is her dysfunction expressed as a dystopia)
Romance: Carly's Call Me Maybe, You're Not Alone

13. Goodwin also said there are several notions of looking (screens within screens: Depeche Mode's Stripped, mirrors, stages, other reflections

14. There might even be archive footage of real events or other media texts put in (Queen's Radio Gaga) or it might purely consist of that (Queen/David Bowie's Under Pressure, David Bowie's I'd Rather Be High has a few seconds of performance from Bowie but its nearly all archive footage of war).
Or it could be archive footage of their own work (Queen's The Show Must Go On). There are some cases where the audience have made these through UGC (Depeche Mode and Kate Tempest's about Europe)

15. There have been many more music videos shot in black and white then there have been films shot in black and white since colour was introduced. 

16. Representing reality, there can often be actual human talking seen both without singing (Bronski Beat's Small Town Boy, Mojo's Lady (Hear Me Tonight)) and with singing (Halsey's Colors, even the band can be doing it separate from the narrative like in Depeche Mode's Strangelove, although was that outtakes?)

17. Performance and Narrative, they are sometimes separated, there can be a location where the act is singing on their own (in Maroon 5' Sugar, lead singer also sings individually without his band in some segments, in Halsey's Colors she is just singing in 
In One Republic's Counting Stars the performance and narrative/concept segments are brought/revealed to be together (can you apply Todorov's theories to that)

18. The length will usually want to stay between three and five minutes. For singles there will frequently be a radio edit released as the single and a longer version on the full album. Mostly the music video will always use the radio edit version. 
Examples: Daft Punk's All Around The World and Sigala's Give Me Your Love.
Or like Daft Punk's Get Lucky there will be two videos for both the single and the album version.
However there are examples for music videos that use tracks that are

19. For the task I have to do using a previous track for a music video promoting a compilation album, that is not so common if not extremely rare, often instead there will be one new single released with a music video and added to all the tracks collected there is an example like Army of Lovers's Crucified, for which they released a 2013 version with the same track (however it was mainly a performance video mixed with a large amount of montage clips).

20. There can often be silences at the beginning and/or end, instead of diegesis
    Depeche Mode's Shake The Disease.
    Kendrick Lamar's HUMBLE
    Other Examples.

Examples where it immediately starts with the track, not a second of silence:
Depeche Mode's I Feel You
Bring Me The Horizon's Throne
OneRepublic Love Runs Out
OneRepublic Counting Stars

21. TITLES
Mostly at the beginning
Track, then act, then director
Can be called a film by the act or the director
can promote the album (Robin Schulz: "from the album")









 

NARRATIVE THEORY #3 - Intertextuality

Julie Kristeva is a French semiotician.

For example an musical artist will also refer to their own line of work throughout their career, David Bowie did this more and more from the 1990s onwards, for example on the track "You've Been Around he used the recognisable chorus chant "Ch-Ch-Changes"

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*Insert Spotify embed code*
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However, there can be more unnoticed forms of intertextuality, as that Ch-Changes is a recognised part of pop culture and (having been covered and used for films such as Shrek 2 and was sung in the cult fantasy horror series Supernatural, it has thereby become one of Barthes's cultural codes)

When is it accidental, when is it intentional? 

When doing the digipak and website I will look to many inspirations from both the artist I have chosen as well as the "look" of other musicians and artists from other mediums.

Similiraties between Nirvana's look and Tin Machine, was one stealing from the other? All band members wearing suits isn't the most left-field idea

APPLIED TO MUSIC VIDEO
Is music video the most intertextual medium?
Goodwin's six types of signifiers, linking to simulacra of Baudrillard. 

Music videos inspired by contemporary art, read here for some examples.

Goodwin later names these as different types of intertextuality within music video:

• Social Criticism 
• Self-Reflexive Parody
• Parody
• Pastiche
• Promotion 
• Homage

SEVEN TYPES OF INTERTEXTUALITY, can these all be applied towards music and the promo package?

CATEGORY I

The TV series The A-Word quoting King Lear but the character knowingly doing that and says it.

This category comprises specific books or texts mediated directly through the author. Revision, translation, quotation, allusion, sources, conventionally understood, an author's earlier work - all belong here. Largely the dynamic consists of authorial reading and remembering, though performances count too (as a kind of reading) and the memory may be subconscious rather than conscious and purposeful. Emrys Jones, for example, well demonstrated the shaping influence of Mystery Play cycles on Shakespeare's histories and tragedies. The evidence for textual transactions in Category I has largely been the identification of verbal iteration or echo (those endless and often disap- pointing lists of parallel passages) though there are verbal possibilities in matching concatenations as well, in lexical or imagistic patterns. There is also non-verbal evidence available in scenic form, rhetorical and stylistic figura- tion, and thematic articulation. 

Type 1: REVISION
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This type of intertextuality features a close relationship between anterior and posterior texts, wherein the latter takes identity from the former, even as it departs from it. The process occurs under the guiding and explicitly comparative eye of the revising author. The revision may be prompted by external circumstance - censorship, or theatrical, legal, or material exigencies. Alternatively, the revision may simply reflect an author's subsequent wishes. The reviser who is not the author presents another scenario and an entirely different set of problems and considerations. In all cases, however, the transaction is linear, conscious, and specific, marked by evidence of the reviser's preference and intentionality.

Type 2: TRANSLATION
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Translation transfers, 'carries across', a text into a different language, recreates it anew. The later text explicitly claims the identity of the original, its chief project an etiological journey to itself, or to a version of itself. Translations are generally grouped according to source language, and judged by standards of 'fidelity', i. e., the closeness of the rendering to the original and the success of the translator in representing the original's literary quality and effects.

Type 3: QUOTATION

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Quotation literally reproduces the anterior text (whole or part) in a later text. (For general purposes of description, we may view textual allusions as a typesof quotation, in effect, quotation without verbal iteration, quotation asreference not re-enactment.) Quotations may be variously marked for reader recognition, by typographical signals, by a switch in language, for example, or by the actual identification of the original author or text:

Type 4: SOURCES
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Source texts provide plot, character, idea, language, or style to later texts. The author's reading and remembering directs the transaction, which may include complicated strategies of imitatio. The source text in various ways shapes the later text, its content, or its rhetorical style and form.

CATEGORY II

Both of these can be applied to genre potentially

Category II contains traditions. An originary text radiates its presence through numberless intermediaries and indirect routes - through commentaries, adaptations, translations, and reifications in other works. It exists in combina- tion with other originary texts, largely as a set of inherited expectations, reflexes, and strategies. The source remote does not lie far off from the tradi- tions of Category II. But there is a real distinction between the direct influence of, say, a sixth-form Virgil passage, half-remembered many years later, and the indirect influence of traditions, in which the originary text may never have ever been read by the author at all. 

Type 5: CONVENTIONS + CONFIGURATIONS

Poets constantly appropriated and adapted numerous conventions from classical, medieval, and continental literatures, formal and rhetorical. Senecan conventions in tragedy, the chorus, messenger, domina-nutrix dialogue, sticho- mythia, and soliloquy, for example, have all attracted due attention. So have Plautine and Terentian conventions in comedy: eavesdropping, disguise, lock- outs, stock characters like the witty slave, bragging soldier, blocking senex, and so on.

Type 6: GENRE
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Just like films will often refer to the archetype of a genre like Michael Myer's mask Category II intertextuality also includes the wide range of linkings implicit and explicit in generic choices. These may appear in individual signifiers (e.g., the play-within-the-play of revenge tragedy, the singing shepherds in pastoral), which function much like conventions, or range to broader and less discrete forms. On the far end of the spectrum often a sophistication and smoothness of adaptation makes difficult positive identification of origins.

CATEGORY III

Type 7: PARALOGUES
Can be compared to Barthes's cultural code.

Paralogues are texts that illuminate the intellectual, social, theological, or political meanings in other texts. Unlike texts or even traditions, paralogues move horizontally and analogically in discourses rather than in vertical lineation through the author's mind or intention. Today, critics can adduce any contemporary text in conjunction with another, without bothering at all about verbal echo, or even imprecise lines of filiation. In some ways the discussion of paralogues departs from past critical practices, bringing new free- dom; but, of course, new perils threaten: rampant and irresponsible association, facile cultural generalization, and anecdotal, impressionistic historicizing. Though some would not care to admit it, the practice of adducing paralogues
is not new. E. M. W. Tillyard's citations to Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesi- astical Polity and Dionysius the Areopagite's treatise on celestial hierarchies function intertextually as do post-structuralist citations of the hic mulier pamphlets as background to the gender play of early modern literature. The same holds true for modern uses of The Return of Martin Guerre, the rhetoric of Elizabeth or James I, or the documents of colonial discourse, though now moderns tend to see literary texts as contested sites, rather than as self- contained, discursively significant wholes.