Music Video Analysis 5: Girls by The 1975

I chose to analyse The 1975, as they are quite similar to Arctic Monkeys- they're both British, 'indie' bands. When I looked through their music videos, I decided that Girls would be the most appropriate and useful to evaluate- as the performance and narrative is pretty much a 50;50 split, an objective that we hope to emulate in our own music video. I also liked it as there is a concept throughout the video- and that's also something we want to try in ours.

The narrative is, essentially, the band not wanting to perform in the music video/ hating everything that's being put into the music video, which creates the sense of reluctant stardom, combined with the feeling that the band don't really care about anything 'but the music'. This attitude is incredibly popular in the 'indie'scene.

      The song's wikipedia page includes this description:

The official music video for "Girls" was released on 23 October 2013.^[3] It follows the video for "Sex", which changed the art style of the band's music videos that were originally monochrome. Rather than reverting to the black-and-white style, the band decided to continue making music videos in color. Speaking about the music video, lead singer and guitarist Matty Healy said:

When we released our last video ['Sex'], people really reacted to the fact that it was in colour. There was a lot of conjecture and talk surrounding it - due to the fact that it was an unexpected stylistic change. It was brought to our attention that certain people thought we were 'conforming to a record company's wishes' along with other expected and unexpected clichés. Obviously this couldn't be further from the truth, we are lucky enough to be surrounded by a group of individuals whose mantra centres on facilitating our creative wishes, we found the whole idea of us being told what to do fascinating. The story of the band who suffer at the hands of a record label shortly after a delirious rise is a tale as old as time. So we kinda wanted to make a tongue-in-cheek video about it. Twinned with our love of '80s pop, its innocence, grandiosity and conceptual ideas in music videos – we wanted to make a video about a record label's attempt at enforced conformity. We got our mate Adam down to a studio in Los Angeles at the start of our USA tour, got four models and made a video about us not wanting to make a video.^[4]

The shots of the music video are nearly entirely mid-shots. I think that the director made this decision to give the video, and the band, a carefree, no emotions vibe. This distance put between the audience and the band creates an aura of mystery and vagueness.
       However, there are a few close ups of the lead singer, which creates a link between the viewer and the vocalist. This puts the importance of the lead singer above the rest of the band, which is definitely an established feature in rock music videos.

Short takes are very frequent in this piece, with a few long takes scattered throughout the video. This relates to convention, as the video parallels with the upbeat, 80s like, tempo of the song.

Mise-en-scene is massively important in any music video, but the costumes that we see in this video are pretty eye-catching. The men in the video wear quite smart clothes, with leather jackets or blazers. The women either wear lingerie or swimsuits. The director uses this to make fun of 'pop' music videos- where the women are hypersexualised and the men are dressed to look smart or classy.

Overall, this music video is used for comedic effect. The fans of the 'indie' genre like it because its taking the mick out of mainstream pop videos, creating a sense of superiority and pretension of the band, a theme that can be seen in a few of the music videos we've looked at.

Music Video Narrative

The narrative for our music video is about a man who starts a new relationship, and the relationship ends up in a disastrous break up.

It starts with our main protagonist heading to a speed dating event and this is where he meets his new girlfriend and they hit it off. At the start of their relationship it is going great for the protagonist and his girlfriend however, their relationship takes a turn for the worst. They start arguing and this is the start of the break up. We follow the protagonist to his home, to see that he's upset about the argument.

They meet up so the protagonist can apologise for what he said. The girlfriend rejects his apology, it leads to another argument that gets very intense between the two of them. This leads to violence from the girlfriend, to the point that she even throws a vase at the protagonist.

After having the vase thrown at him, the protagonist runs away to his house. Both the protagonist and the girlfriend are looking into the mirror, showing how upset they are about what happened. As the girlfriend tries to get him back by ringing him, the protagonist ignores the phone call, and in a fit of rage she throws her phone. This ends the narrative about their relationship.

However during the scenes where the protagonist and the girlfriend were arguing, it cuts to a clock that is symbiotic to their relationship. The first time we see it, the clock has a one or two cracks. It goes to another shot of the clock with slightly more cracks. The third with even more. The final time we see the clock is after the girlfriend throws the vase at the boyfriend. The clock is completely destroyed, full of cracks and shards of the glass on the floor to show the relationship is broken and can't be repaired, no matter how hard they try.