Textual Analysis 2 - The 1975 'The City'

Genre: Indie Rock, Alternative Rock, Electronic Rock, Indie Pop

Structure: Performance, Abstract

Written by: The 1975 (full band)

Director: James Booth

 

The Video is completely in black and white which is conventional of the genre as it makes the images darker. The bands focus is always away from the audience, which is also conventional of the genre. It gives the video more of a vague appearance, which adds to the abstract narrative. This is done by a lot of artists and not just the alternative rock/ indie rock genres; it can frequently be seen in videos of the soul genre. Most of the people in the video have visible tattoos which is conventional of the genre as it shows the band to be ‘edgy’ which is backed up by the costume used. All black clothes for the band including leather jackets shows that they are individuals but is also very conventional for this genre as it keeps the look of the video dark.   

There are a lot of slow motion shots in the opening shots. This is something that I would like to try for my music video so I will need a camera that has a high frames per second shooting ability. There are also a lot of fast shots which are made to look even faster because of the slow motion shots. There are also a lot of track shots of the band members to go with the fast editing, which makes it look like the camera is moving around the band very fast although it will only be a normal speed when recorded. The band members all have long hair which shows the genre as mainly indie rock but also other sub genres of rock like alternative rock. I don’t think that I will want to use long haired actors in my video because I am focusing closer on the alternative rock genre than the indie rock genre   

The video is edited to the beat of the music which is conventional of all music videos as it helps to bring the digesis of the video together instead of separating the audio and visual aspects of the video which would make the video look strange and not make sense.

There are lots of shots of the band playing their instruments which is conventional however they are all shots of them playing individually rather than as a band which is unconventional. It does however work for this video and looks good but I wouldn’t try it for my video because I think that it is a style of the director that most other people wouldn’t be able to make look right.  

There are three different sets of people in the video; the undressing woman, the fighting men and the couple. The way that the video has been edited together makes it hard to distinguish between the fighting men and the kissing couple at times. This could have been deliberate however, it is hard to tell.   

The opening shot of the video is a white rectangle on a plain black background which is part of the band’s debut album cover which is similar. The only big difference is that the background is grey on the album cover and has the band name written through the rectangle. This establishes the band before the music has started, which is useful for TV screenings e.g. on music channels however online the audience have selected the song that they want to listen to. The white rectangle does however give aesthetic pleasure to the audience as it sets the black and white tone and as it fades out, and the song starts playing the singer’s face is centred inside the rectangle.

There doesn’t seem to be a meaning behind the video and it is purely visual although the images of the city streets at night put onto peoples torsos could show that the city is naked meaning that all it is, is what can be seen and nothing is hidden. This idea is supported by the images of “sex shops” and “video XXX” on other people’s bodies.  

Audience… The audience of the video are fans of The 1975 who are generally aged between 14 and 29 and fit into the demographics C2 – A. They are mainly indie rock fans rather than alternative rock fans but they fit into the same group of people who read NME magazine which publishes a variety of different genres including indie rock, alternative rock, hip-hop and soul, meaning that the readers will find out about other bands and probably go and listen to them depending on the review in the magazine.  

There isn’t a lot of representation in the video due to the black and white shots and abstract structure. However, the shots used reflect the audience as bans and fans want to look similar so that people know that they are fans of a certain music genre or band.