In Vernallis’ text, Telling and Not Telling, music video production is categorised on a spectrum from narrative to non-narrative, rather than definitive categories. At the narrative end of the spectrum, music videos that are heavily storyboarded to tell a history and where the lyrics reflect the video narrative. Moving towards non-narrative, we see music videos with a story or theme, however, it is cut up with imagery and a resolution may not be made. Now onto the other side of the spectrum, we begin to see music videos with less than narrative, where imagery, music, and lyrics are combined into a new medium to maintain engagement as the audience moves focus between each element. At the end of the spectrum are music videos with non-narrative, fragmented videos often based around the singer or band performing played against completing a process, a category list of settings or actions or a travelogue which is a combination of both process and category list, such as driving a car into the night. (Vernallis, 2004).
An example of contemporary music with a strong narrative is Macklemore’s song, Same Love. The lyrics describe the singer’s own experience as a homosexual while growing up and touching on gay rights issues. The music video narrative closely follows the lyrics, telling the life story of a gay man, from his birth until death. We see the character’s life stages in chronological order, such as playing as a child, a high school dance, meeting a man, falling in love and getting married. Key lyrics are highlighted by footage of the character experiencing the same situation or with film grabs of gay rights campaigns. There is no doubt the narrative in this music video is very strong, it is an extremely literal interpretation of the song.
At the other end of the spectrum as an example of a non-narrative music video, is Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’. In this video, Eilish performs the song to camera cut into fragments in various settings, costumes, personas, and actions. These fragments repeat and rotate throughout the video with little order and a sense of narrative. This style of video suits the pace of the song and Eilish’s alternative, indie genre. Compared to Mackelmore’s video, Bad Guy appears to be at the other end of the narrative scale that Varnallis’ text describes, however, both music videos complement the style of artist and song effectively.
References list:
Eilish, B (2019), ‘Bad guy’, Youtube Channel, 29th March, viewed on 7th November <https://youtu.be/DyDfgMOUjCI>
Macklemore & Lewis, R, (2012) ‘Same Love’, Youtube channel, 2nd October , viewed on 7th November <https://youtu.be/hlVBg7_08n0>
Vernallis, C. (2004). Experiencing music video : Aesthetics and cultural context. New York: Columbia University Press.
