Narrative functions within music videos

 Narrative functions within music videos

Music videos are built around the song and often do not follow a traditional narrative structure, often using singer as narrator and/or character, with a lot of image repetition similar to the repetitive nature of songs with choruses. Studios are also set on creating a star image around the character. Goodwin believed that all music videos follow three types of narratives, these are as follows: 

 

Illustration: illustration is the telling of a story within to the song though images shown throughout the music video, an example of this is Kanye west's song, ‘Touch the sky’ from 2005 from the album late registration.

 

 

 

 

Above are some images from the ‘touch the sky’ music video as we can see this video is clearly linked to the song title of touch the sky As Well as many other lyrics that are reflected in the video, this is showing an example of how the video illustrates the lyrics, we can see the whole theme and story of the video reflect the lyrics as they come. 

 

 Amplification: Amplification is where the contents of the video amplify the song so that things that are not clear in the lyrics are then amplified by the video. An example of this is Peal Jam’s song ‘Jeremy’ in 1991 from their album Ten. 

 

 

 

 

This video is an example of amplification as what connects the video to the lyrics is not clear when listening to the lyrics, but when paired with the video the deeper meaning behind the lyrics is shown. This video refers to a true story of a boy called Jeremy who, was teased and bulled at school as the lyrics show and his parents did not give him attention, so he took his dads gun and shot himself in front of his class, this is shown clearly in the video but less clear in the lyrics. 

 

Disjuncture: Disjuncture is where the music video has no connection with the song and could not be connected if you watched the video without any sound. An example of this is the Weekend song ‘save your tears’ released in 2020 from his album After hours. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When listening to the lyrics of ‘save your tears’ and watching the music video, it is clear there is no connection between the two and it seems to be more random and is not a reflection of the song, this represents no relation between the actions in the music video and the song lyrics with a more random theme that could have its own connotations not reflected in the song lyrics.