Diversity of music videos

Diversity of music videos

Why would an artist chose to create a diverse music video?

To appeal to an audience a music video usually needs to contain a strong narrative, big celebrities and memorable settings. The type of clothing they wear or even the clothing they don't wear needs to grab the audience's attention, the iconography in the video using has a part to play in the narrative and is usually linked to some sort of product for fans to purchase. Some artist miss behave or swear to gain viewers too. However Chris Cunningham and and Michael Condry go against these typical characteristic's and to create diverse and unique music videos instead.

Chris Cunningham has produced music videos for stars as big as Madonna. He also worked with Aphex Twin these are the two videos i will be analyzing.

Madonna - Frozen

In this music video 'Frozen' Madonna is not portrayed as the typical pop artist she is. The video is set in a desert and is breaking all the conventions of a pop video. This is to stand out from the crowd. The positive points about doing this is that Madonna is now being seen as different which is targeting a different type of fan base potentially increasing her fan base and the video is memorable which means that people are going to remember Madonna for doing this phase. Negatives can also become of this type of video as the target audience cannot relate to it. The current audience for Madonna will show no interest as it is not her typical type of music video this could mean that she would potentially loose a lot of fans also, in a way this video could make Madonna unpopular.

 The style that Madonna has gone for in this video is 'Gothic' which matches her song as it is about problems, love, depressions and emotions. Black is a shielding colour and represents a dark time.

In the lyrics 'love is like a bird' is said the visual on the left (crows) represents this and follows goodwins theory. Madonna transforms into an animal (right) in the video representing her untamed video. This is a sad video representing an emotional artist at hand, this was her 1990's image.

Aphex Twin - Come to Daddy.

This music video is more of a short film than anything, it goes against all the conventions of a typical dance video and is completely unique. There is no club setting or strobe lights used and the artist is unknown. This is unusual as the artist in dance videos are usually the center of attention and there would be a lot of close ups of them through their videos. In this video the beat is fast pace and the visuals mask this beat. The characters are scary and somewhat frightening to the audience making the video uncomfortable to watch, almost like a nightmare. There are no censorship rules present and their is no relationship built with the artist through the video at all. The narrative features an old woman being terrorized by a group of creepy small children, this video is memorable simply because of its horror theme and masked characters.

 The old woman at the beginning of the video is showing fear through her eyes to the audience to let them know that this video is a frightening piece of work. The dog barking allows the audience to know that their is paranormal activity present as the TV is not plugged in and yet turns on.

The characters in this video really emphasis the horror theme as the audience will be frightened of their presents. Their is a link between lyrics and visuals as it says 'Come to Daddy' the 'children' run.


Michael Gondry on the other hand worked with Kyle Minoge and White Stripes. I would describe his videos as more creative rather than strange in comparison to Cunningham's work.

White Stripes - Hardest button to button.

In this music video the guitar and drums are used to highlight the genre 'Alternative Rock' the artists wore leather and dark colours such as red and black with leather this also highlights the fact that they are rock artists as that is a stereo type. The visuals match the beat throughout the entire song this is due to the fact that at every beat a new instrument or piece of stage set up appears on screen. The video as a whole was 100% performance. This video is a lot like his Kyle Minoge video in the effect that everything on set is increasing in amount when the beat hits or chorus is repeated. 

 On the left the make up and costume shown is dark, this is evidence that the music video has some 'rock' characteristics. The lyrics to visuals have a slight relation as it says 'box' and a man with a red box appears (right hand photo).

 The increase of instruments is a theme throughout the entire video the instruments are placed to the beat and go up and down as the beat does referring to goodwin's theory of visuals to lyrics.

Kylie Minogue - Come into my world