Exam practice 1

Theories for music video:

Theories that I have applied in my music video includes the star persona by Richard Dyer, which explores the star image and how it is recognizable for audience in order to differentiate from other artists and at the same time how it came to become a iconography of their genre of music.

Our artists, are based on a Indie band, which follows the trends of the costumes, for example we had the artists wear t-shirts, which is conventional in most Indie bands, such as ‘Operation Please’. The impression of t-shirts are always thought to be less glossy and casual as suppose to signed artists or bands, which is what conventional Indie assumed to be like. We wanted to develop a more unique concept, So we adopted the theme of the 80’s revival, through using colours, for example yellow, pink, green, red. These are all vibrant colours which are associated with the 80’s and it also corresponds to the electro pop genre. It is demonstrated that the colours are part of our uniform, as you could identify that we have each band member to have their own colour to represent their individuality, for example I have the yellow print t- shirt, which represents that my star persona as being artistic, hopeful and symbol of the sun and summer. The personality of this constructed artist conforms to the genre of the music. The idea of the sun, also corresponds to the sci-fi element. In the Asia culture yellow represents sacred and imperial feelings, which brings into us to the development of mixed ethnic in the band. Having a mixed group of different ethnic helps to build a wider base of audiences as it would appeal to other cultural people in other continent like Asia and the Caribbean. This makes our band more unique and distinguished because it challenges the conventions of a Indie pop electro of having a black female lead as it is more conventional to have a white ethnic to be the main lead vocalist. For example Vampire Weekend is a Indie band but is a white main vocalist. East Asian artists in Europe and America are not as dominant as in Asia and usually solo artists outside of Asia, which shows that we are attempting to challenge because we have a Asian in a mixed Indie band. Artists such as Mc Jin(Rapper) and Vanessa Mae (Violin) are examples of solo asian artists. This shows evidence of us challenging the star persona.

The idea that we are made up of a all female band, contrasts to the conventions of being feminine because the music is rather upbeat and active, which are associated with masculinity and being feminine are represented as being more passive. This reflects on female dominance, which appeals to more female audiences as they could relate to it (personal identification- uses of gratification), for example artists like ‘Pink’ and ‘Lady GaGa’. Although they are examples of mainstream artists, they have similarities with our artists persona, which could be that we are challenging conventional representations of females or it could be argued that actually Indie is becoming more mainstream.