The musical style of Boy Pablo, a Norwegian project that features chilling indie pop music, is rather consistent. In contrast to the stable musical style, the music videos of this band are rather diverse and experimental, consisting of multiple ways of aesthetic cinematography. In this blog post, I will mainly examine its 5-chapter cinematic album named Wachito Rico(2020)

The 5-chapter cinematic album named Wachito Rico(2020), explicitly demonstrates its ambition of storytelling, more specifically, telling a self-discovery story of a boy named Wachito Rico through his love story with a girl named Sophie. What makes the emphasis on narrative more prominent is the narrator as VO throughout all five songs, which improves the consistency and completeness in terms of story-telling. However, the VO only exists in music videos and does not exist in the official audio versions of the songs. At some times, it interrupts the song (and the ongoing narrative via lyrics), adding supplementary value and a sense of directional temporality (Shaviro, 2016, pp. 363-364), although the images are not even “fragmentary” and do not necessarily need a VO to construct a story. In this case, rather than acting a pivotal role in the construction of the narrative of music videos, it is more likely that the VO is deployed as one of the techniques to add zest to the somewhat old-fashioned, nostalgic, warm aesthetic style. The story told by the VO not only provides a reference story for listeners to comprehend emotions and feelings in music, but also offers a framework where listeners can build their imaginations and connections consequently.

I find this kind of different manifestations in audio between a soundtrack and a music video very interesting. Usually, we think it is significantly important to maintain the consistent play of music as it is a rather linear cultural product, and that’s probably one of the reasons why people feel so upset when Spotify put audio ads in the middle of the playlists/soundtracks of free users. The consistent storyline (although the love story is a bit cliche), the VO, and the same characters (Wachito Rico and Sophie) exclusively exist in music videos connect five songs in this album and create a complete story, adding supplementary information for the music. But Listeners can still comprehend each song without watching music videos. It makes me wonder if offering specific storylines for listeners a more efficient way for them to comprehend what emotions, feelings and ideas those songs are trying to convey. Or, will it curtail imaginative spaces? Will the supplementary narrative added by visual images a boost for the process of generating emotional interactions and connections with the music or the other way around?

The diversity of aesthetic styles of music videos of Boy Pablo also demonstrates the playfulness and arbitrariness embedded in the form of the music video itself, especially in the context of the digital media environment where platforms such as YouTube play a vital role in influencing production, distribution and consumption of audiovisual materials.

For example, what made Boy Pablo so famous as an indie pop band at the beginning is one of their music videos for the home-produced love song ‘Everytime’. This video went viral in 2017 because a YouTube algorithm placed this video on autoplay after clips from similar content, several months after the song was first released. The frequently used close-ups and zoom-ins remind me of anti-MTV videos. The facial expressions of the band members who are knitting their brows because of the sun somehow make them looked like they are angry with or confused by something.

The production of this music video is rather spontaneous according to an interview with Boy Pablo. “We didn’t have much planned. Fabio [Boy Pablo’s manager, who also runs 777 Records] had just brought a camera, so he thought, why not try it out? It wasn’t raining”, says Boy Pablo. The inclusivity of music videos allows artists to try various ways of expression, providing space for experimental attempts. And the distribution and the subsequent viral circulation of it are the same, which to some extent shows the arbitrariness of music video not only as a form of audiovisual media but also as a cultural product being circulated and consumed in the digital media networks.

Bibliography

Shaviro, S. (2016) ‘Splitting the atom: Post-cinematic articulations of sound and vision’, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film.

Buchanan, R. (2020) “Boy Pablo: ‘I’m just a normal dude that got lucky’, By Rhys Buchanan,” On the Cover – Boy Pablo: “I’m just a normal dude that got lucky.” NME. Available at: https://www.nme.com/big-reads/boy-pablo-cover-interview-2020-wachito-rico-2767633 (Accessed: November 30, 2022).

Hunt, E. (2018) Boy Pablo: the Norwegian internet sensation laughing through the heartbreak. NME. Available at: https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-radar/boy-pablo-interview-2018-2392435 (Accessed: November 30, 2022).

Ruiting Yang
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