Illustration, Amplification and Disjuncture

Music videos can fit into three broad categories; each of which have a different tone and can impact the listener's interpretation of the song itself. The reasoning behind choosing one style over another could be one of the director's intention to control this interpretation, to be it's own artistic creation and gain its own fame (such as Michael Jackson's Thriller) or to match the genre or beat of the song.

The three styles of music video are:

Illustration:

The simplest and most widely used concept. Illustration takes the lyrics of the song as represents them visually. This style is dependent on the lyrics of the song, as the video needs to stick quite close to the source material, leaving little room for creativity.

Examples:

Chamillionaire - Ridin'


In this instance, the rapper says "next to the Playstation controller" as the shot changes to show a woman holding a Playstation controller. This tells the audience that the narration relates directly to the video.

Digital Underground - The Humpty Dance

As is the case with many dance-centric songs, the music video acts as a visual guide to learn the dance, meaning the video is 100% performance. The dance in the video is timed to line up with the appropriate line in the song.

Amplification:

Amplification is similar, as the theme of both song and video are quite similar, but more artistic liberties can be taken as the content is not as reliant on the song. The video serves to amplify the lyrics of the song by placing related images into the viewers' heads.

Examples:

Oasis - The Importance of Being Idle

The song lyrics are based around the concept of the character's apathetic nature leading to his downfall. This theme is shown in the video as the narration centres around the character working as a funeral director. The character is shown to be dancing around a coffin, showing his appeasement for death. An interesting note to make is although performance forms a part of the video, the person lip-syncing is an actor, not the actual singer of the song.

Blur - To The End


Although all of the band members feature in the video, the video is 100% narration. The video uses subtitles to tell a slightly altered version of the story in the song's lyrics. The video promotes many of the key themes of the song while having it's own identity, utilising lighting and subtitles in a homage to silent films.

Disjuncture:

The most risky in terms of band branding and advertising, due to the video and song having nothing in common. The most creativity is need in this style as it is easy to make a video that fails to connect with the audience when it is not reliant on the song for auditory cues. These videos are the most likely out of the three styles to become cult videos, again as they are very much independent from the song. 

Examples:

Kasabian - Vlad The Impaler

With the exception of the odd time the pace of the video increases in time with the hook in the song, the video and song are very much unrelated, telling a separate story which is 100% narrative. This was a good candidate for a video showing disjuncture as the song itself has no standout message, and so any video can be made alongside it as it could show anything without seeming out of place.

Arctic Monkeys - Don't Sit Down 'cause I've Moved Your Chair

The video mixes performance and narration, but the excessive use of distortion and blurring makes the whole video difficult to watch and follow what is going on. The images bear no relation to the song's lyrics, however.