Narrative in music videos

In what ways is narrative important of the success in music videos?

By referring to theories and video examples and discussing the question: How do stars sell their image through narrative?

In today’s music industry, everyone knows how important a good music video is to a song to make the song become popular or increase its popularity or purely, for financial reasons, make more profit. Surely, there are crazy, outstanding and extravagant music videos a la Lady Gaga style that just raise awareness because of their unusualness… but what is actually the meaning behind the flashing images? And how are these meaning conveyed and structured? The answer is - by a narrative. Even if not every music video tells a story, again like Lady Gaga mostly, we can spot narratives in almost every music video. I will show and evaluate how important a narrative is to a music video by discussing theories of Todorov, Barthes and Propp and giving examples of music videos of The Band Of Horses, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.

All narratives demonstrate structure, causality and agency.

Firstly, agency tells us how we recognize certain characters. Looking at Propp’s ‘Morphology of the Folk Tale’ in which he claims that in every narrative there are certain character types. The villain, the hero, the donor, the helper, the princess, the father, the dispatcher and the false hero. These roles can slightly alter or not all be in it when it comes to a music video in contrast to a film with a far more developed narrative. But these character types still appear or leave hints of them, whether it is the artist himself, dancers, hired actors or featured artists.

In the music video to ‘Dilly’ by The Band Of Horses we can apply this theory and identify the character roles. Even though the beginning of the video introduces the band as a motorbike gang with tattoos and beards and shades which signifies rather bad boys and could be the villains, they turn into the heroes in this video because we sympathize with them because they have magical powers and randomly start dancing a funny dance. Main focus is given to the topless guy with the curly hair because he gets most screen time and stands in the front of the band. Therefore he can be identified as the hero and the other band members are his helpers. The quest could be finding someone such as the princess who is the pretty girl sitting in the bar looking upset. The dispatcher of the villain is another man in the bar who calls the chief who is the actual villain. He has a gun and an angry face signifying he wants to chase the hero gang. It also has a typical ending when the heroes overpower the villain and his helpers and are filmed in a heroic position from a low angle from the dead chief’s body.

Due to the use of narrative in Dilly, the viewer likes the band as they are the good characters and we think about them as something supernatural which refers back to Dyer’s theory of the stardom, saying that one paradox about the star image is that he has to be simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary. This happens here with the Band of Horses as they are normal biker boys but at the same time have super powers and win against evil. The success here is supported by narrative because we like the unusual idea and it makes us follow the song and the clip which raises the interest and attracts consumers.

Secondly, the structure is analysed by another theorist, Todorov, who says that all mainstream narratives adhere to a similar structure. This includes the equilibrium, the first force or the disruption of this, the recognition or the disequilibrium, another force as the resolution and finally a new equilibrium. For example, in Beyoncé's video to ‘If I Were A Boy’ we can find this structure and apply Tomorrow’s theory. The equilibrium is the marriage between Beyoncé and her husband who lacks trust and respect as he takes her for granted. But she takes over the role of the husband which stands for the disruption and shows him how it feels like being treated like that. The disequilibrium is when Beyoncé starts flirting with her attractive colleague and the husband recognizes this situation, as well as Beyoncé when she gets caught almost kissing him by her husband. The resolution is when Beyoncé realizes that she was only dreaming and is thrown back into reality, where her husband is actually doing all this to her which is the new equilibrium although it’s like the original one. This structure of the video makes us see the video as a film and increases the entertaining factor. Also, relating it to Beyoncé as a star, we see her from two different sides as two different roles – the one makes her fans think how strong and attractive she is as a woman and on the other side how beautiful and fragile underneath and that she is just like us, a woman worrying about her love life and relationship. This again goes back to Dyer and the second paradox on which the star image is claimed to be based: she is in the video and therefore absent, but at the same time dealing with human problems which bring her close to the audience.

I think that this video reinforces the significance of a narrative even in a music video as it makes it more interesting and creates emotions for the viewer.

The last narrative theory that can be applied to approach the question how narrative is important to music video is Roland Barthes’ theory of the five narrative codes. These help the audience to understand the sense of the events but also encourage polysemy of them. In this case, the focus is on the Hermeneutic/Enigma code and the proairetic code which hint on the problems or events that going to happen and then on the possible resolutions. We can identify codes in, for example, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé's very filmic video to ‘Telephone’. First of all, the location of a female prison is an Enigma code as it articulates the question ‘Why is Lady Gaga in a prison? What has she done?’ and suggests that the clip is either about her life in prison or her break-out. This code keeps the story going and raises curiosity in the viewer. The next proairetic code we can spot is the phone that Lady Gaga nicks off the woman while they are making out and then the matching shot of the helicopter in the sky. This gives a suspension to the story and makes us asking ourselves ‘Why did she take she phone? Does the helicopter belong to Lady Gaga? What’s going to happen?’ Another proairetic code might be Lady Gaga’s wink into the camera when she leaves prison suggesting that she has a plan and makes us think ‘Who bailed her out? What is she going to do when she’s free again?’ The next big code, an enigma code, is the car in front of the prison picking her up that then reveals Beyoncé sitting in it. The questions ‘Who is that woman? What does she have to do with Lady Gaga? Are they going to commit crime together?’ are raised. And so on….

Overall, we can see that the narrative analysis in music videos has a lot in common with films with the little difference that a good narrative is key for films whereas a music clip can be interesting and enjoyable to watch even if it doesn’t really tell a story as its length is so much shorter and is more allowed to break conventions of camera and editing etc. But still, how I just showed with the examples of videos, a narrative is almost always present and increases the value of a music video. It is the way in which a story is told, keeping the video comprehendible to the audience. It is the coherence of the story and makes the audience stay interested in it and in the best case – like the video.