Cobra Starship was formed in 2006, they made their way into the Top 10 and US hits with ‘Good Girls Go Bad’, featuring Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester, when looking through their music videos is evident that this event led their career down a more commercial route, similarly to the idea of ‘music videos as products of record companies, in which images were put to recorded pop songs to sell songs’ (Arnold, 2017)

‘Music videos appear as a kind of catalyst in media change’(Arnold, 2017) this can be applied to a variety of videos by Cobra Starship. In ‘Good Girls Go bad’ (2009) and ‘#1Nite’ (2011) we can see the evolution of the mobile phone, in the 2009 video we get to see a Nokia phone as a form of product placement, being used multiple times throughout the short video, with very fast paced scenes that make it appear less intentional. Similarly in the 2011, they showed the use of an iPhone, however, this time it felt a lot more obvious and intrusive throughout the video.

It can be said that this advertising technique turns musicians and their visual/audio products into commodities, the videos seem to focus less on meaningful narratives and more on the idea of selling a lifestyle, selling the artists as a concept. For example, when comparing older CS to the ones mentioned above, we get to see that there is a change in style, the newer videos have very similar narratives and aesthetic styles.

In the 2011 ‘You Make Me Feel’ video, we see a man searching for ‘Bill’s burger’ on ‘Bing’ and seconds later we see the same man eating a burger in a club, it is interesting how the product placements in these videos seem to become less subliminal as the years went by, reaching a point where it felt more like watching an advert than a music video. This strip the artists of any credibility and creativity through their visuals.

References:

Music/video: histories, aesthetics, media by Gina Arnold (2017)

Unruly Media by Carol Bernallis (2013)

‘Good Girls Go Bad’ (2009)

‘You Make Me Feel’ (2011)

‘#1Nite (2011)

By Gabriela Vadcard