Andrew Goodwin - Narrative and Music Videos

The main ideology of Goodwins theory is that traditional storytelling doesn't apply when it comes to music videos. This is because when it comes to music videos the narrative is created around a song and songs don't follow a normal narrative, choruses get repeated which you wouldn't normally get in a story. Music videos also use the singer as a narrator as well as a main character in the story being told in the video, as well the singer also looks directly into the camera breaking the 4th wall. Goodwin says their are three different types of relationships between the song and the music video. The first being illustration, this is when the lyrics match what is happening in the music video. The second is amplification this is similar to illustration it's just that the images on screen are exaggerated compared to the lyrics. The last is disjuncture which when the lyrics don't have any correlation to what is happening in the music video.

Illustration

Madonna as a 'little girl'

Madonna's Pappa Don't Preach is a perfect example of illustration as most of the lyrics are recreated in the music video. The first example of this is when she sings the lyric 'Cause I was always your little girl' because this image is shown on the right of her and her dad playing when she was young which is a direct link to the lyric being sung.  

Dad telling her 'right from wrong'

Another example of this is when in the video we can see her dad telling her to eat her vegetables as well as helping her wash the dishes and the lyric being sung at this exact moment is 'you always taught me right from wrong. This is an illustration because we can see her Dad encouraging her to do the right thing.

As soon as the lyric 'The one you warned me all about' is sung this image comes up with a young man walking gazing towards madonna which is an obvious correlation to the boy that her dad has warned her all about.

Amplification

Basement Jaxx shows exactly what amplification is by slowly turning monkeys heads into the bands members, this is amplification because they are singing wheres your head at when in the video their heads have literally been cut onto monkeys.


To the right this is the image shown when the lyrics 'wheres your head at' are sung. This links directly with the lyrics because the monkey is holding his head, almost checking to see if it is still there.








In this photo we can see that the monkey is angry and is breaking into where the human is watching them perform. This happens as soon as the music starts to build tension and slowly build up, this then helps emphasise the story that is happening in the music video.

Disjuncture

Groove Armadas superstylin is an obvious example of disjuncture because the main themes of the song and lyrics is to do with a club and performing electronic music when the music video is all about aliens discovering earth through bass and finding out about the culture of earth.

This first image we can see is the band talking in a radio studio about sending signals of bass into space which had nothing to to with the lyrics "we're superstylin". This is an example of disjuncture because what is happening on screen doesn't have relevance to what is being sung about.





A later example is here when we have the two 'aliens' walking along the street, this has nothing to do with the song except for the fact that they have a large speaker which is a convention of house music.