Music Video Styles

Narrative

Narrative based music videos tell a story throughout, and are strongly linked to the lyrics at the same time. They channel a message across and sometimes the audience can relate to them if it's a situation that can happen in real life. An example of this would be Love The Way You Lie by Eminem and Rihanna. It is mainly narrative with a small performance element because we see both the artist performing the song in front of a burning house. The narrative of the video is  a couple played by Dominic Monaghan and Megan Fox who visually look to be in a loving relationship, but the reality of it is revealed as the video goes on. It turns out they are in a very violent relationship, and when listening closely to the lyrics we see this is more apparent. Violence is playing the key part in the story and although some people might think that it is being glamorised by using a well known actor and actress, it's purely to raise awareness of what happens in day to day life. Not only do the actors promote the song along with Eminem and Rihanna, but they are raising their own profile as a celebrity, and to be involved in a music video with such an important narrative is a credit to everyone involved. It also helps the audience to remember the song because of the roles played by Monaghan and Fox.



Performance
Performance based music videos focuses on the artist putting on a performance or some sort of dance routine to go along with the song, and they don't necessarily have to contain any story. In the video for American Idiot by Green Day, we see the band performing their song along with their instruments that they play. It almost looks as if they are performing for someone, but they are simply doing it to the camera, but are still putting on a performance. In these types of videos they use a lot of close-up shots of the main singer in the band, with this one being Billie Joel. More than the other two styles, performance based music videos have a wider vafriety of camera shots and angles, and as you can see from the video, they are very popular among rock artists and bands/.



Concept
Concept based music videos are neither narrative or performance based. It's where the video only loosely relates to the lyrics, and the video itself doesn't relate at all. The purpose for us as the audience means we can create our own interpretation and meaning of what we think it's trying to do.