Categories of music videos
Performance
based videos
Performance
based videos are often showing the band or artist of the song performing their
song in the music video. Rock music videos often do this, for example: Green
day’s American Idiot. The videos are normally showing the artists, what they
are wearing, and what they are singing. Performance based videos would be
boring if it was just showing a performance, the artists would normally be
doing something strange on stage, or it would cut to the crowd watching the
artists at some point. Another example of this would be “smells like team
spirit” by Nirvana. The singer would be shown singing with a guitar in his hands at one point,
and it would cut to something like people headbanging.
Concept
based videos
Concept
based music videos are often showing something completely random, and don’t
follow any story line. For example, Pendulum’s music video for Slam. There is a
fairly large man in a suit, who is walking on a street, when all of a sudden;
he starts to remove his shirt and tie, and starts dancing on the street.
Narrative
based videos
Narrative based music videos follow a
story line, and the story line follows the video throughout the entire song. An example of a narrative based music video would be Daft Punk’s “Aerodynamic”
which shows an animated band of aliens doing a gig where the power goes out because of someone messing with it, which then follows with
people coming onto the stage and into the crowd, hunting the aliens and capturing them. The
song goes into a whole album with a storyline.
