8/11/2019 Theories of Goodwin

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Theories of Goodwin

Logics of Visual structure

Goodwin discusses that the synaesthesia and pop’s duals model of address explain a great deal

of the textual detail in promotional clips. However he claims that they do not fully explain itand nor does the narrative structure of the pop video fully account for the narrative structure

of pop promos.

in his writing he claims ‘it is clear that the music video relatively autonomous from the music,

to a limited degree, in a number of ways’ 

These were

1)The visualisation of the song may go beyond its meaning

2)the clips seek to provide pleasure in order to keep the viewer watching and encourage

repeated viewings.

3) The clips might promote other commodities (such as films)

4)the clips might narratives/display images of stardom that exceed any given individual song

The structure of music video 

The three codes of popular music are: music, lyrics and iconography. They do not always

constitute a unified address, and this conflict routinely spills over into video clips.

 An example is Bruce Springsteen song ‘Glory Days’ in which the lyric is apparently

undermined by both the music and the performance.

There is a debate about whether or not the video image triumphs over the song itself needs to

take account of where the emphasis lies in the visualisation (lyrics, music or performance

iconography) and surely then must engage with the question of whether or not it illustrates,

amplifies or contradicts the meaning of the song.

There are THREE kinds of relations between songs and videos, these are: Illustrations,amplification and disjuncture.

Illustration - the visual clips which tells the narrative of the story. The illustration will often

involve the effort to signify a mood, as opposed to telling a story. Dance is often illustrated in

this way where a singer tells us he or she is feeling sexy/romantic, and the dancing attempts to

 visualize this.

 Amplification – occurs when the clip introduces new meanings that do not conflict with the

lyrics, but that add layers of the meaning – this for some critics is a mark of a ‘good video’ an

example of this is Kanye West ‘homecoming’ where we see an image of his house, but we are

not 100% that it is his, however, from this we establish or assume that it is the song‘homecoming’

disjuncture - Is where the music video ignore the lyrics within the song and tries to create a

 whole new set of meanings. This can often cause confusion as they don’t make much sense. An

example of this would be Fat boy slim ‘praise  you’.