‘Music is a narrative that narratives nothing.’
(Theodor Adorno on Gustav Mahler’s music)

Aerosmith ‘Crazy’

This idea of music videos do not contain, as Varnallis puts it, ‘complete narratives or convey finely wrought stories for numerous reasons, some obvious or less so’ seems self-evident at first. But when Varnallis uses the example of Aerosmith’s music video ‘Crazy’ the conventions become more apparent, though I will stress not in a rigid ’cause and effect’ linear narrative. The scenes are episodic and each one ups the ante of what the girls are going to do from driving in the underwear to finally doing a homoerotic striptease.  While the narrative drive is ‘blunt[ed]’ by the appearance of the band, the band itself is part of the narrative, mirroring at times the gestures of the girls, one of which is Liv Tyler, the daughter of the lead singer, Steven Tyler. What I find troubling is that the video is not only very much set in the male gaze (the flash of underwear as Alicia Silverstone escapes the school) but incest undertones. Liv Tyler is fetishised here in a strippers outfit while her father sings ‘I need your love’ . In any case, this narrative video presents a sense of closure as the girls drive off in the sunset, having been set free, as the drive off with a naked man sitting on their laps.
What was interesting and a term that I hadn’t heard of before was the ‘narrative plank’.  Varnallis’s asserts that music videos lack the essential ingredients of a film (place names, meeting times etc) so the ‘narrative plank’ becomes a short hand to set the scene or indeed the narrative. For example, in Marvin Gaye’s ‘Sexual Healing’, Marvin walks into the doctor’s office and begins to talk of ‘his problems’.  We know as the viewer that there is an expectation that a solution or a remedy will be given to the patient so already we have already begun the narrative journey in the present and into the future, the director therefore ‘intuited’ our expectations and thus provided a ‘hook’.  Music videos simply by their form, Varnallis asserts, ‘encourage us to seek out a narrative.’ When that does not transpire, the experience can be unsatisfying.