R&B music video codes and conventions

Males.

In the males of the r&b music industries videos We see a lot of them topless, this is because they are aimed at female audiences and especiallyyoung female audiences.

Tattoos are also extremely common in this industry and in the music videos they portray them as something very cool, this may be a reason for tattoos becoming such a big part of todays society.

Females

In these music videos the females usually wear minimal clothing in order to get the attention of the males who would watch their music videos, an example of this is Beyoncé's video ‘Dance for you’ where she is wearing a very short dress that shows her underwear. They usually wear high heels to ensure their bodies look perfect. The only times this can be broken is if the artist is dancing. This can be seen in Cassie’s video ‘ official girl’ and Ciara’s music video for ‘Like a boy’.

The hair and makeup is usually very flawless and made up. This is because they need to show themselves as being perfect in the eyes of the viewer.

IconographyMost r&b music videos that males make are

extremely sexual as the lyrics tend to be rather sexual and provocative, we see this is Chris

brown’s video for ‘take you down’ this is also a video which shows him topless which makes all the girls scream. This shows that males do these

things to get the attention of the females watching their music videos.

Females don’t fall behind with this sexual content as they are seen in minimalistic clothing dancing sensually to also attract the opposite sex. Their music videos are very easy to be seen through the eyes of a heterosexual male as we tend to watch it as if we were seeing it through their eyes.

This can also be broken in recent videos where the females show themselves in a different light by acting

more in control and being more covered up, we can see this in Cassie’s video for Numb where she is wearing clothes that cover her up a lot more than her older

videos.

Breaking codes and conventions

Lots of artists want to break the codes and conventions that have been set. A lot of females have done this by trying to not dress extremely

seductively and showing themselves as powerful, we see an example of this in

Beyoncé's video ‘irreplaceable’.