Foo Fighters Everlong

Video Analysis

Genre• The usual Foo Fighters music

videos tend to be comedic, they have small stories that have a start and end to them, whilst also showing the band playing the song.

• Foo Fighters are a rock band, and the codes and conventions for rock music is usually the band on stage or in a darkened room, playing their instruments.

• Foo Fighters use these codes and conventions to display they’re genre, but they don’t use them intensively, instead they challenge these conventions by adding irrelevant storylines, and extra meaning to the music.

Relevance with the music.

• This video doesn’t fit to the lyrics very well as the story isn’t involved in them at all.

• The beat to the music however fits well to the transitions of the frames and the movement and acting of the characters.

• At 3:06, the music changes to a soft tone, the video seems to move from the regular conventions of rock, as if it has forgotten that the song is no longer of the genre anymore. It does however suddenly remember its routes, and this is shown in the video by the guy “coming back to reality” and back to its comedic self by replacing the women's legs with logs.

In this screenshot, the fist of one of the villains is punched through the glass pane. This is timed with the music as the guitar and the drums hit an emphasised note. These sort of methods are used commonly in all music videos, either through cuts or movements. In this it is used effectively as at this point there is some urgency for the character to get home, and now a real reason, along with the up beat music.

(2:38)

The director.

• The director of this music video was Michael Gondry.

• Gondry is a French director, directing many music videos over the 22 years he’s been at it. Many of his music videos are for Bjork and The White Stripes.

• Gondry mainly uses the same style when doing his videos, repetition. This can be seen in his video for Kylie Minogue’s “come into my world” and Daft Punk’s “around the world”. This is also seen in the music video for “Everlong” where the character wakes up to answer the phone, but then we get pulled back to the other characters dream, to then see the character once again wake up to answer the phone.

The audience.

• The Foo Fighters audience ranges much for the Foo Fighters. They aren’t a very hard rock band, yet their music isn’t as soft as they look. When looking at the band and listening to a few of their songs, it would be easy to assume that the audience would be young teens, but when you watch the music video, the visual appearance of the band shows they are targeting a vaster range of audiences, from young kids to young adults (around 25). They do this through the comedic representations of themselves, which is displayed well in this music video, mainly broadcasted by one of the members being dressed like a woman.