Andrew Goodwin: Key Features Of Music Videos

Andrew Goodwin: Key Features Of Music Videos

Andrew Goodwin in Dancing In The Distraction Factory (1992) has identified the following features of music videos:

• Music videos demonstrate genre characteristics (eg stage performance in metal video, dance routine for boy/girl band).

Skillet - Monster

In this music video for Skillet's Monster, it very much illustrates Goodwin's theory, that the video demonstrates genre characteristics. For example,  in the video there are close ups of instruments being played, and also the band are playing on a stage-esque area.

Bewitched - C'est La Vie

In Bewitched's video for C'est La Vie, you clearly see Goodwin's theory. It shows us the dance routine that Goodwin states Boy/Girl bands have. The four girls dance in synch all to the same routine.

• There is a relationship between lyrics and visuals (either illustrative, amplifying, contradicting)

Daniel Powter - Bad Day

This music video represents what is being sung. It shows how to people seem to being having a very bad day, often, just a Daniel Powter is singing.

Paramore - Playing God

In Playing God we see the protagonist playing God with other people's lives. For example she kidnaps them and poisons them. But this doesn't really represent the lyrics. It only really represents the song title.



• The demands of the record label will include the need for lots of close ups of the artist and the artist may develop motifs which recur across their work (a visual style) For example Michael Jackson and Katy Perry. (to be analysed in seperate blogs).



• There is frequent reference to the notion of looking (screens within screens, telescopes, etc) and particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body.

In Charli XCX's music video 'Break The Rules', the female body is shown in a way that insists it is only for sexual pleasures. As the girls in the video wear short, revealing clothes and at a point of the video wears lingerie.

• There is often intertextual reference (to films, TV programmes, other music videos, etc).

In the music video for Paramore's Decode, there are frequent references to the film Twilight. With sequences from the film, or the same setting, from the film, in the music video.