GENRE essay

Genre: (Music Video)

Genre is a critical tool that is used to categorise different texts from one another through forms and conventions such as style and audience responses. The production I will be talking about is the music video I produced where I challenged genre conventions through the bricolage of more than one genre, which attracts a larger audience. Therefore I found it very hard to distinguish the exact genre of my music video. My music video was a hybrid of genres as it had a mixture of ambient sound, with a Dubstep and electro instrumental. The concept of our music video however, was conceptual which held very little narrative structure, yet through the use of ambient sound it ensured that the video had a personal appeal. To represent dubstep and electro which is very energetic and exciting the use of location of London achieves this.

‘Uses and gratifications’ research has identified many potential pleasures of genre that include ‘pleasure’ from particular genres because of our familiarity with it and the sense of emotional pleasures of empathy of escapism. In the music video that I created the audience definitely will achieve the sense of ‘escapism’ because of the ‘hyperreal’ state in which the video visuals provide to the audience, where I have used locations such as London at night time with the energetic lighting and freedom. Similarly Chandler defines a genre.....

Mittell has argued that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate within industry, audience and cultural practices as well. Being familiar with codes and conventions I believe that I was able to use genre to sell my product through the use of stylistic approach to the music video and the representation that the video offers through ideologies and the way in which the artist was presented. This meant that the target audience were more like to consume the music video because it was fulfilling their particular pleasure. The artist is a presented as a young, powerful independent woman who has a ‘role model’ figure which the target audience would feel more likely to be interested in. I found that when it came to using genre to sell my product through research on existing artists that have a very similar sound to the artist I created I was able to reference and achieve the right genre through looking at the already given audience and fan base where I was able to learn more about the genre in which they like and what the characteristics are that the audience define them with making them recognisable.

Further on, a similar approach I also believe that my production offers what Altman has argued as ‘a set of pleasures’, he explain three type of pleasures, ‘emotional’, ‘visceral’ and ‘intellectual’ pleasures. The one pleasure that my production relates best to is having an emotional pleasure, as the audience generate a strong response to my music video. In order to successful meet the emotional principle, I found that by using certain shot types such as close ups and the use of mise-en-scene would help support the genre. The close-up shots provided the ambient genre creating the more personal appeal to the audience allowing the audience to feel empathy and build up emotion towards the artist.

Abercrombie (1996) ‘the boundaries between genre are shifting and becoming more permeable’ I agree to some extent with Abercrombies theory because many media texts are shifting and tend to meld, as with my music video production I believe to have mixed different aspects of electro/dubstep/ambient within the video through the visuals relationship between the music and visuals of the sound mixing with the style.

I believe my work has successfully met genre conventions through maintaining the theorists that I feel had a good relation to my production.