Music Video Analysis

Textual Analysis of a Music Video.

The Music video I have chosen to semiotically analyse is “White and Nerdy” Weird Al Yankovic because it features multiple stereotypes for both ethnic identity and genres of music as it is a parody of chamillionaire’s “Ridin’”.
This text appeals to a wide audience due to the fact it is humorous, it will appeal to people who listened to the original song and therefore will find it funny to juxtapose this video to the original and also people who can relate to the main character in the video a while middle aged male.
The Media Text’s audience will already have assumptions of the video due to the title of the video. The audience will most likely view the text on the internet as I did, this is probably because the artist is not featured on television a lot and also due to it being comical people are more likely to paste links of the video to people they know, this also affects the age of the audience to some degree, as generally the older a person is the less likely they are to go searching around on you tube for videos and showing them to their friends.
I will now look at how components create this representation, i.e. a text that has a meaning encoded by the creator of the text (In this case Weird Al) for the viewer to decode (Stuart Hall 1980).
Mise En Scene plays a large role in creating representation for both the “Gangster” and “Nerd” stereotypes featured, clothing such as tucked in polo shirts, loud colours and glasses connote both intelligence and in some cases social deprivation which can be juxtaposed very quickly with Dark Colours, “Bling” and baseball hats.
A good example to use within the video of how much mise en scene can show these stereotypes is how the white male clearly presented as the nerd but weird al is presented as the gangster figure because of his clothing despite he is still a white middle aged male.
The props used throughout the clip help connote a stereotype also such as cars and alcohol being associated with the gangsters.
Throughout the video non verbal connotations also appear to help explain what is happening, such as facial expression and positional communication.
Sound in the clip is the most prominent feature, due to it being a music video, this is relevant to the narrative, because the music itself is rap - music popular with the gangster image portrayed in parts of the clip, but the lyrics are all about nerdy interests, such as dungeons and dragons, maths, star wars and a lack of sporting ability.

The editing throughout the clip is used predominately to aid the understanding of the lyrics due to the speed they are sung, so most of the time images are shown in the background behind the singer so that the audience can work out what the song is about, also the transitions are quick, this helps aid the music that is relatively fast, and give a quick general representation of “nerd” culture in a 3 minute video.
A fade is used at the end of the video to clearly show the end, where Yankovic uses a “Vulcan Salute” a hand gesture commonly associated with star trek.

The camera angles featured did not play a particularly connoting role in the music video apart from scenes where the nerd character was positioned higher than the gangsters, to make him appear bigger than him; this is used due to link in with the narrative of the gangsters being scared away because of his geeky mannerisms.

in music video’s non verbal connotations run throughout the video, in the form of gesture and facial expression, this can help reveal the narrative as there is no speaking in the video and therefore would be difficult to work out what is happening between the characters if not, in the case of a music video these are usually exaggerated considerably to make sure this is possible, such as when the gangsters flip him off there expressions are probably quite different to if they had done the same action in a television show or film.

Overall I find the clips representation of ethnicity is quite inaccurate, due to the music video being a parody the representations have to work on stereotypes and for us to recognise these stereotypes mediation must take place.