With the collapse of Music Television stated by Vernallis in the 21st Century, changing from MTV to a Reality TV (Vernallis, 2013) . Music videos have been more popular than ever before through the mainstream variety of media, whether it is Twitter promotions/leaks of their new music to whole narrative storytelling music type videos on YouTube as it allows the creator to have more creative freedom of aesthetics, new creative approaches and the way they want the music video to be presented/represented since they don’t follow the logic of institutional television. A good example of this that will be used on this blog is, the music videos “Pendulum” from FKA twigs who breaks boundaries to a stereotypical music video.

The music first starts off with an extreme close up of a woman’s lips in which she is lip synching the lyrics and instead of cutting to a new show, it is instead held and really slowly pans out of the frame revealing for of the woman. By doing this already, it breaks the stereotypical music video of performers dancing towards the screen. Instead the viewer is forced to feel uncomfortable and intimate as later on we see that when it slowly pans out, it reveals that she’s tied onto ropes creating a shocking image. Furthermore it restricts the viewer forcing them to watch this sort of “one take” where it’s almost like she is in power and having a intimate conversation towards the viewer so even though in the music video she is represented like a used/thrown away girlfriend, she is in power forcing the viewer to look at what she has become. Throughout the music video, majority of the screen time is shot at a same one spot instead of the usual change of locations which creates and furthers this intimacy between the viewer and the woman tied onto ropes.

Bibliography

FKAtwigs, 2014. Two Weeks. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8yix8PZKlw [Accessed 29 November 2024].

Carole Vernallis, ‘Music Video’s Second Aesthetic’, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema, 207-233

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