Lil Wayne - 6 foot 7 foot
The music video is inspired by Christopher Nolan's 2008 hit film "Inception" which could be identified as an intertextual reference. The scenes in this music video consists of visualizing the majority of the metaphors that he says, this fits in well with Goodwin's "Codes and Conventions" where there is a relationship between the lyrics and the visuals.
A rap video is often stereotyped as having a generic look and feel to it, consisitng of a hard-knock "gangster" life, women, booze, flashy cars and money. This however, has a different approach, which is creativity, whether it's just a mash-up of visual metaphors, rather than a video full of the typical expectations. With this paritcular song, the music itself definitely has that "drive" to feel good and to just enjoy the rap and the repetitive beat, it's not meant to be taken seriously, the lyrics are not relatable. The song, as a whole, is "one for the fans"
When adapting Peter Fraser's conventions for a music video, Lil Wayne's music video, as mentioned previously, the narrative is set out to be pretty clear and evident. The beat/tempo of the song fits in well with the editing of the video, because as each lyric/metaphor is being shown, it cuts back to the artist. You can easily identify what genre the song as the lyrics/artist is a rapper. Typically, a rap song is a rapper spitting his verses over a beat, no hook or chorus. If anything, the world of rap is notoriously known for sampling classic soul/culture music as the roots go back to the soul era. The people alongside with Lil Wayne are also dressed up in the typical rap conventions: Hoodies, sneakers, bandanas, cigars etc.
You find that there is a lot of close ups of the artist and the artist's peers i.e. Lil Wayne's manager/label owner "Baby" Birdman, who is the owner/founder of the YMCMB label, which Lil Wayne is signed to and both Wayne and Birdman are known for having a good, close relationship and he is known for appearing as a cameo in Lil Wayne's videos. This establishes and sells the artist as people can identify each of them.
The music and the video itself appeals to preferably male, aged from 16-30, pretty much any race but mainly the urban race, I would imagine they would like rap music and the lifestyle the artist show. The audience will be single, middle classed or below, possibly earning a 9-5 wage and not too high or low up the financial scale. Their hobbies will involve a keen interest in music, mainly rap/hip-hop music who will have a good knowledge on the history behind the rap world.
I believe, the ideology behind Lil Wayne's music is basically letting all that raw energy out on a song, which evidently will have an impact on whether the music is good or not. As an Artist, a rap artist, this is essential because it allows the rapper to express the words, lyrically, to a "good" rap standard.
In conclusion, I believe the artist has followed Goodwin's and Peter Fraser's theory by applying a relationship between the lyrics and the video, the demand for close ups etc.Using Lil Wayne's music video for that little bit of creativity such as the on screen visualisation of the lyrics could may well be useful as our song choice "Kickstarts", which also has a couple of rap verses in the song. I think we could maybe adapt his lyrics and create our own homage of sort where we could also visualize the lyrics and to keep in mind a music video requires a plot to make it interesting and fun to watch, which is what Lil Wayne has evidently achieved.
Some nice Goodwin analysis, Bilaal. Just a few pointers:
ReplyDeletethe third paragraph feels a little unclear to me - can you make it simpler?
you talk about the audience 'psychographically' but then go on to refer to demographic features - maybe just define the audience without referring to demographic or psychographic at this stage;
can you spell out how this video is creative - what features do you find creative?
- at the end, can you sum up whether it follows Goodwin's model and sum up what you can learn from it?