Friday 10 June 2016

MVid EG1: Pixies - Bagboy

WHAT WE APPLIED: USE OF COLOR IN A MUSIC VIDEO E.G. COLOR POWDER

Artist: The Pixies
Track: Bagboy
Year: 2013
Director: Lamar+Nik 
Lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/pixies/bagboy.html

Today I analyzed a song called BAGBOY by PIXIES. The genre of this song is alternative rock and/or indie.




I found that this music video was very unusual, because there wasn't a link between the lyrics and what I saw in the video. Most of the videos I watch have a clear link between what you see and the lyrics. The character that we are seeing is a young boy and is not the one delivering the words. Also, the band isn't shown throughout the whole music video, which means that the video is based on a concept rather then the perfromance by the band.

Alternative rock or Indie lyrics tend to address topics of social conceren, such as drug use, depression, suicide and environmentalism.

The indie genre, often uses the hand-held camera is cheaper and it helps to signify realism during the video. Several hand-held tracking shots are being used throughout the music video to make clear who the central protagonist is. Bronwen and I have also been thinking about to have some hand-held camera when doing our music video specificially for the purpose of creating realism

The Pixies are a band that started out in the 1980s. This means that they nowadays might not appeal to a youthful audience as much as they did back then in the 80s. However, their music video for BAGBOY is using the colourful smoke to appeal to a new youthful audience and make them want to watch their music video as well as their target audience who are now in their 40s. At the beginning, you would think that the video isn't appealing to the female gaze, because the main character is not glamourous or very good looking.

However, later in the music video, there are some bright colors involved in the baloon scene and the bathtub, which appeals to a female audience.


UPDATE: Good use of color, which is interesting because typically a genre specific convention of the rock genre is that it is quite dark.

The boy fits with the band, since indie and rock is not based on glamour, so it makes more sense using someone less glamourous. The boy connotes the young version of the PIXIES. So the shot of his forehead with the Pixies in the beginning, is a representation of the lead singer, Black Francis. 

Several tracking shots are being used throughout the music video to make clear who the central protagonist is.

One clear thing that I immediately noticed when starting to analyse music videos is that most of the time, their is the name of the band and of the song that is portrayed in some way. In the case of the BAGBOY music video, the central protagonist has "PIXIES" written on his forehead and then there are big capital letters in the middle of a playground of the name of the song. Like most other music videos we intend to
have the title of the song and the name of the band/artist in our video. However, we don't want to do it by using a font but make it more creative such as the case for BAGBOY by writing the band's name on a forehead.


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