Music videos function as an advert for a song. Music videos often take a confusing, contradictory and even bizarre mode of address, primarily to provide interest and excitement to the target audience. But what if the very form of music videos reflect our fractured and confusing modern society?
Jean Baudrillard – theories surrounding postmodernism
“In a world with more and more information, there is less and less meaning”
Advances in technology, for example through digitally convergent media such as the internet, means that people today have far more access to information than previous generations. However, with the more information we consume, the more confused we get. Social media has eroded meaning, as information shifts rapidly and can be reshaped and contorted
There is no such thing as reality - everything we see and hear and consume is a reconstruction. It is not technically ‘real’, it exists to sell something. Furthermore, everybody has their own unique view of reality. Media products have polysemy, which raises a complex issue. How can all interpretation be equally valid
Representations are more real than the thing they are representing
hyperreality - where the representation is more real than the thing being represented
We live in a simulation - the simulation hypothesis suggests that nothing is real and we actually exist (?) within an advanced simulation or approximation of reality. This bizarre idea is made at least somewhat plausible through the fact that we absolutely cannot refute this idea, even through established trains of philosophical thought and conjecture.
So what does this all mean!?
The world is a confusing, strange and unpleasant place that we have no hope of comprehending. Therefore there is no point in trying to make sense of the world, and accepting a worldview where nothing means anything is preferable
Postmodernism is…
A distrust of society
The confusion of living in a world with no meaning
The experience of growing up in a world bombarded with different messages
Retreating in to media to escape the world
Postmodernism is not to be confused with…
Nihilism - an ideology that believes in nothing and where nothing matters and there is no point. Postmodernism is broadly along the same lines but is a lot more playful. Nothing matters so let’s have fun with irony and confusion!
What does Riptide mean?
A confusing and highly complicated music video that offers a range of polysemic interpretations to the target audiences
It doesn’t mean anything. The video is deliberately confusing and strange, and is so because it is a literal interpretation of a nonsensical song…
The video is about being watched, about stalking, and about watching women . This is reinforced through the MES of women’s hands, the repetition of shots of women, and the explicit MES of a book that reads ‘techniques for photographing girls’. This idea can be referred to as scopophilia (the love of watching) and/or voyeurism
The video features a montage of shots off hegemonically attractive and almost identical blonde women. The video presents a hyperreal representation of ‘[perfect women’ and suggests that media products use images of beautiful women for the pleasure of the audience. This is an excellent example of Van Zoonen’s male gaze theory. Is this a feminist music video??
MES of tarot cards, astrological charts, graveyards, knives and so on constructs a theme of the supernatural and darkness. The video uses many conventions of the horror genre to depict the torture and destruction of women. This is reinforced through the shot of the woman tied to the tree and the woman at the ‘dentist’
The video plays with the flexibility of meaning, and uses confusing anchorage (for example the lyric ‘dentist’ is plated over an explicit shot of a hegemonically attractive woman being tortured), the 1 dollar bill with the famous triangle symbol on it, and the master shot of the performing woman where her makeup progressively gets worse, her voice clearly is not that of the performer, and the incorrect subtitles. This once again refers to themes of torture
A straightforward and completely to the point visual representation of the lyrics of the song. This is accomplished in a variety of ways. The lyric ‘riptide’ features a shot of stormy waters, the word ‘dentist’ features a shot of a woman at the dentist (...), and the hegemonically attractive woman undressing with the lyric ‘pretty girls’. However, the video subverts expectations through providing a contrapuntal juxtaposition between the jaunty music and the creepy visuals.
Contrapuntal sound - where the sound deliberately doesn’t match up with the image of a media product
The video is about kidnapping, torture, murder and abuse. These themes are constructed through the colour red, which functions as a semiotic code for death, the fast paced and manic editing, and the increasingly broken subtitles, that anchor the themes of degradation and destruction of perfection. The narrative, such as it is, seems to focus on the MES of women being tied up, escaping, running, and being captured
A binary opposition is constructed between light-hearted perfected and creepy, abject horror
Abjection - the process of cutting something off and casting it aside. Vomit, blood, sweat and urine are all disgusting when excreted from the human body as we are not supposed to see it.
The video focusses on the representation of hegemonically attractive women. All with blonde hair, hourglass figures, and the anchorage of the reference in the lyrics to ‘Michelle Pfeffer’. The women’s bodies are reminiscent of ‘beach babes’, a particular hegemonic stereotype of beauty often seen in music videos. The music video therefore captures a particular aesthetic. It constructs the ideologically ‘perfect’ representation of women as imagined by the producer. It could adobe a criticism of the stereotypical representation of women
The MES of tarot cards, pendulums, graveyards and so on, making explicit reference to witchcraft and the supernatural