Video Analysis

I am going to study 2 different music video's, one by Wu-Tang Clan and another by a similar group that are under the same genre: Hip hop/rap. The second video I am going to study is by the group Cyrpress Hill.

I will be looking at and comparing both video's by writing about their representation, narrative, audience and how the video's communicate meaning and their genre.

The first video I am analysing is the song 'Gravel Pit' by 'Wu-tang Clan':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGS7I8_UXhM

Representation:
The most obvious representation used in this video is of stereotypical men 'cave men'. Many males flaunting their wealth, strength, clothes and woman.
The video seems very sexist in that the men have female slaves or woman held captive and tied up. The woman have to dance for the men and they seem to not be respected, an obvious point is when one of the men hit a woman over the head with a club for no apparent reason and then drags her off by her hair.
Another stereotype is that the men fight in the 'gravel pit', this reminds me of the old gladiator arena's, at one point in the video the camera zooms out to show the 'arena' and there is a sound effect added of people cheering.
The video turns into a stereotypical Chinese fighting scene, where Wu-tang clan turn into Ninjas and fight against other ninjas. The men are portrayed as having super powers- being able to fly into the sky.
I would say the only un-stereotypical element of the video is that the theme of cave men and ninjas is quite unusual for a hip hop group's video.

These are some examples of my ideas- print screens: showing the caveman theme, the woman held hostage, the clothes and jewels being flunted and the expensive looking clothes.






Narrative:
The story of the video seems to be told through the various members of Wu-tang Clan.
The basic story is that the main character's-Wu-tang clan- a large group of men are in an elevator after they had been clubbing and they all seem to want to go to different places, so various buttons get pressed in the elevator. The elevator turns into a time machine and sends them to the year 2000 BC.
They turn into cave men and flaunt their wealth and have female slaves.
And then towards the end of the video clip Wu-tang Clan turn into ninjas and start to fight other ninjas. I feel the narrative of the video is mostly a story of Wu-tang Clan having fun and pushing gender boundaries in being quite sexist in a comical way.

Audience:
I feel the audience for this video would be mostly Male between the ages 15-24 but with some female fans aged between 16-20. This tends to correlate with the results I came up with from their overall fan base in my previous blog.

Meaning:
I am not certain of the true meaning of this video but I feel from watching it that it may be a comical nudge at being a bit controversial with sexism.
The group seem to be having fun in the video which is nice to see as many hip hop video's can tend to be quite serious.
I feel that Wu-tang Clan wanted to show themselves having fun and show off their wealth and power.

Genre:
Hip hop/rap

The second video I am analysing is the song 'As we enter' by 'NAS and Damian Marley':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMGd3mAfl-0

Representation:
This video again is quite stereotypical of Hip hop video's with only males featuring in the video. Unlike the previous video by Wu-tang Clan this is quite serious and there is a sense of anger and a message trying to be sent out.
The dark clothes and hoodies are also another stereotypical aspect of this video.
I feel that the video is trying to represent that 'real hip hop is dead'- the famous saying. NAS and Damian Marley are extremely famous and almost always seem to sing about real issues in the world and are trying to bring hip hop back.

These are some print screens of the points I have made about males only featuring in the video- acting out to camera, the dark clothes and hoodies and dark and serious set and atmosphere.

Narrative:
This video is told through NAS and Damian Marley to 'us' the audience. It is as if they are actually speaking to the viewer by the way they look right into the camera and seem to talk to the viewer.
They take us on a short journey through words and seem to be stating they want to bring back 'real' hip hop and sing about real issues in the world compared to some commercial hip hop acts these days who seem to sing about wealth.
A few quotes from the video that back this idea up are 'Must be dementia that you could even think you could touch our credentials' and 'The king's is back, time to return the crown'.

Audience:
I feel the audience for this video/song would be similar to Wu-tang Clan's video as it is in the same genre but I feel that both woman and men would listen to this in more of an equal amount for example men 60% and woman 40% with both ages being between 16-45.

Meaning:
As I stated earlier I believe that this video/song is telling the audience that hip hop is going to change again and that it is no longer 'dead', that NAS and Damian Marley are going to give us 'real hip hop'.

Genre:
Hip hop/rap

Target Audience of Artist/Band

To establish the target audience for Wu-tang Clan my chosen artist. I have looked into their audience in terms of psychographics, demographics and socio-ecemonic classifications. I will back these up with various screen grabs and images of magazine covers they have featured on.

To begin with I will talk about wu-tang Clan's Facebook and Myspace fan pages. I found that on facebook there were up to 6 different fan groups, with many fans up to hundreds of thousands.

This image is a screen grab from The artists Myscapce page.

From looking at the type of fan's on their Myspace page I chose at random 10 different people to focus on to gather my information. I found that most people were in their early 20's with the exception of 3 people who were aged between 28-70.
5 out of the 10 people were male and 5 were female, I found that this was true of other fan's on the page and on the Facebook page as there seemed to be an even mix of both sexes.
9 out of the 10 people were from America and 1 being from Hawaii, I found that most of the fan's were American on Myspace as well as Facebook.
Half of the fans on Myspace seemed to be Caucasian with the other half consisting of Asian and mixed raced people.


This is a screen grab from one of the Facebook fan pages.

I found that Wu-tang Clan had featured on a number of different magazines. One being an American magazine based on Hip Hop called 'The Source'.

This is the sources target audience, which I found on their website.

Target audience
Age: Unknown but I think around (18-34)
Gender: 50/50
Class: C1, C2 and D
Nationality: American
Psychographics: individualists, aspirers and mainstreamers.

The Source Magazine doesn't have any information on The NRS records as it is not such a mainstream genre of magazine, so I have emailed the magazine and I am hoping they will email me back with the information.

Another magazine I found that Wu-tang Clan featured on is 'The Face' magazine.


This is an extract that I found about 'The Face' magazine from the search engine Wikipedia:
'The magazine, often referred to as the "80s fashion bible", was influential in championing a number of fashion music and style trends, whilst keeping a finger on the pulse of youth culture for over two decades'

The magazine was based in the United Kingdom and doesn't seem to exist anymore, It's seems to of ended in the year 2004. Another quote from Wikipedia back's this up: 'By its May 2004 closure, there were too many competitors, sales had declined and advertising revenues had consequently reduced'.

Unfortunately I couldn't seem to find the magazine's readership information.
But from the extracts about the magazine I found, it states that it was for young people I would say aged between 17-25 year old men and woman.

I found that Wu-tang Clan also featured on the famous magazine 'Rolling Stone'.

Fortunately as this is a very famous magazine I managed to find out a lot of information about the magazines readership.

This is the image of the cover they featured on.

This is information that my group and I found from the Rolling Stone website.

It shows the figures for their readership for the year of 2009.

This list of results shows that 100% of the readers are over 18 years of age.

Out of the 100% of readers, the percentage of men that read the magazine was 58% and remaining were 42% woman.
The most popular age of people that bought the magazine in 2009 were ages 18-49 which contributed to a huge 86% of readers.

72% of the readers were employed.

The magazine was most popular with white people at 75% I find that this is true as I found most of the fan's on Facebook and Myspace were white.

This is a Facebook group that my group and I created to try and help us figure out who Wu-tang Clan's audience is:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=155074551182678#!/group.php?gid=155074551182678&v=wall

To conclude I feel that Wu Tang-clan's target audience is woman and men of the ages 18-49 which is quite a wide target audience but the information I have gathered shows that this is their audience. My group and I have chosen to keep to Wu tang-clan's target audience and target our video for their song at the same audience as we feel is is very wide and would appeal to all these ages.

Permission

I wrote to Universal asking permission to use the song 'Protect Ya Neck (the jump off)' by Wu Tang Clan.
Copyright is important in the music industry to protect song's against theft.
One of the reasons to do this is to make sure that the royalties get to the right people and the original artist does not loose money.

This is a definition of copyright: from the website 'wikipedia'
''Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work.''

Song Choice

My group has decided to create a music video for the song 'Protect Ya Neck (Jump Off)' by the famous rap group 'Wu Tang Clan'. We decided to use this song as we all have an interest in this genre. Another reason why we chose to pick this song was because of the fact we can challenge racial and and gender issues.

The group also looked at many other songs to try and find the best one for us. An example of one of these songs is Beastie Boys 'Intergalactic' We all really enjoyed the song but came to the conclusion that it would be too hard to recreate a video that was different to the original one. Another example of the songs we looked at was Cypress Hill's 'insane in the membrane' but we felt again that it would be too hard to come up with an original idea for a video for the song.

We chose Wu Tang Clan's song 'Protect Ya Neck' because we felt that it was possible to create an original idea for the video, we would also like to challenge racial and gender stereotypes by for example switching the lead singers to woman and the backing singers/dancers as men.

The lyrics for the song are:

"Protect Ya Neck (The Jump Off)"

[INS]
Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to welcome to you
All the way from the slums of Shaolin
Special uninvited guests
Came in through the back door
Ladies and gentlemen, it's them!

Dance with the mantis, note the slim chances
Chant this, anthem swing like Pete Sampras
Takin it straight to Big Man On Campus
Brandish your weapon or get dropped to the canvas
Scandalous, made the metro panic
Cause static, with or without the automatic
And while I'm at it, yo, you got cash, pass it
It's drastic, gotta send half to Dirty Bastard

[Raekwon]
Ayo, ayo
Waves is spinnin, blades is spinnin
Slay em in the eighth inning
Stay truck, god stay playin linen
Kill rap, observe the uptowns, ho, feel that
Mink jeans on, seen where the real at
2000 zitos, movin wit a ill ego
For real, for real, ill lines, ill people
Yo, bring it back, 9 more civilians
Pollyin deals, monopoly and bills
Y'all niggas lyin
Caught 300, lab look royal wit a mean stomach
Go broke, all seen, done it
Words from the heavy set
If I don't eat, then we already met
Fly ass bro, liver than coke

[Meth]
Now what Clan you know wit lines this ill?
Bust shots at Big Ben like we got time to kill
Niggas can't gel or I'm just too high to tell
Put on my gasoline boots and walk through hell
Wit 9 generals, 9 ninjas in your video
9 milli blow, semi auto wit no serial
Man metaphysical, I speak for criminals
Who don't pay they bills on time and fuck wit digital
Never seen, smoke a bag of evergreen
My sword got a jones, more heads for the severing
Johnny in the dungeon, takin all bets, throw ya ones in
Scared money don't make money, throw ya guns in

[Masta Killa]
That's word to Jah Mo, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Blowin hydro on a beach wit Tamiko
My gun bullet hollow for you to swallow
Blowin the nozzle, hear it whistle
One in the head, this is code red, man for dead
X amount of lead spray from the barrel
Heat clear the street like Connor O'Carroll
Fully equipped, rifles, banana clip shit
To make my niggas from East New York flip

[Bobby Digital]
Yo, you may catch me in a pair of Polo Skipperys, matching cap
Razor blades in my gums (BOBBY!)
You may catch me in yellow Havana Joe's goose jumper
And my phaser off stun (BOBBY!)
Y'all might just catch me in the park playin chess, studyin math
Signin 7 and a sun (BOBBY!)
But you won't catch me without the ratchet, in the joint
Smoked out, dead broke or off point (BOBBY!)

[Ghostface]
Wallo's comfortable, chocolate frosting
Your socks hangin out, yours is talkin
Rock so steadily, son, I'm still crazy
Sport my old Force MD furs in the 80's
Nat Turners wit burners, Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Taught y'all niggas how to rap, reimburse me
Rothsdale's, ruby red sales, Bloomingdale's, blocks
Ox tails chopped up in Caribbean spots
I'm nice, maxed out, creepin wit the ax out
Murder these bikini bitches, switchin with they backs out

A few of the lyrics in the song would be unsuitable to air to under 18 year old's and we feel that they may not be needed so in our video we will blank out the rude words or change them to something more suitable.

Introduction and Exploring music video

This is the link to my introduction and blog 2: Exploring Music Video: http://zarakirkpatrick.blogspot.com/