Post-Modernism

Post-modernism is wide-ranging term which is applied to literature, art, philosophy, architecture, fiction, and cultural and literary criticism, among others. Postmodernism a reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. Basically instead of thinking that there is a definite answer for everything that can be explained through a certain method it says that nothing can be fully explained and that things will always be changing. For this reason, postmodernism is highly skeptical of explanations which claim to be valid for all groups, cultures, traditions, or races, and instead focuses on the relative truths of each person. In the postmodern understanding, interpretation is everything; reality only comes into being through our interpretations of what the world means to us individually. Postmodernism relies on concrete experience over abstract principles, knowing always that the outcome of one's own experience will necessarily be relative, rather than certain.

With reference to music videos post-modernism is shown through questioning idea's and world pratices.
For instance in the song Diamonds by Kanye West he talks about how people are abusing the human rights of people in Africa by making them work incredibly long hours with little pay to get hold of diamonds (from which the concept blood diamonds arrives). In the video it shows young people in caves and constrasts them to rich people in America who earn their money from the blood money.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92FCRmggNqQ (Kanye West- Diamonds youtube link)

Another song of a differnt genre that imports post-modern idea's into the music video is Beautiful by Christina Aguilera. This soulful song is based on a simple concept that basically everyone is beautiful no matter how they look or what their sexuality is. It combats modern thinking by some people that some groups of people like emo's, goth's, gay's and people who stand out are lesser than other people. The video features clips of these groups first looking unhappy and then towards the end looking more confident as the song becomes more upbeat. The message is also very clear in the lyrics "You are beautiful no matter what they say, words can't bring you down. You are beautiful in every single way. Yes. Words can't bring you down. Don't you bring me down today." Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAfyFTzZDMM

History of Music Videos

 

 

The first form of music videos came to be in the 1930's, when short films/clips were made based on music. Jazz musician Louis Jordan had short films made for his music which were then put together to create a feature film named 'Lookout Feature'. The video to the song 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by Queen was the first proper music video as we know it to be made.

In the 1980's Madonna and Michael Jackson were famed for their use age of music videos as they took inspiration from hit Hollywood films, for example, Madonna's 'Material Girl' which can be linked to 'Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend' from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, staring Marilyn Monroe.

In 2005, YouTube was launched, making music videos extremely internet-friendly. This also allowed for many many artists to become well known through music videos which had been viewed almost entirely online - for example, rapper Soulja Boy found his succes through this way. Many videos are deemed controversial for their content of sex (such as 50 Cents Candy Shop which showed depictions of intercourse), violence (M.I.A.'s 'Born Free' shows the US military killing kids through ways such as blowing them to pieces), and drug use (Soulwax's 'E Talking' cycles through various club-goers taking drugs).

Introduction

 Hello, my name is Nathan Felix and welcome to my A2 mediastudies blog.  In groups we will be making a music video, an album cover, and a magazine advert . On this blog I will be updating on our work and detailing our process, as well as analyising other music videos, album covers and album adverts which have some relation to our chosen genre and products that we will make.