Representation of People

In many music videos today, representation of people can cause much controversy. With the growing competition between the ever-increasing number of new artists and the existing ones, more and more stars are turning to sex in order to promote and sell their music. For example, the RnB artist Rihanna was recently filming her latest music video on an Irish farm, when the owner had to ask her to leave for being topless.

But it's not only the RnB genre who's becoming more provocative. Pop superstar Lady GaGa is known for wearing controversial and barely-there clothes. In her music video 'Telephone' she is seen wearing nothing but yellow police tape.

With sex being used for promotional purposes more widely and frequently, artists have had to come up with more extreme and revealing ways to stand out from the crowd. In a recent survey, 67% of people asked said they thought there was an excessive amount of sexual content in music videos today. 

 Like in the Laura Mulvey theory of Music Videos where she states women are only presented in two ways in music; a "virginial innocent character" or "a whore", more videos today are leaning towards the "whore" type, in order to get noticed. 

  But it's not only the women who are subjected to stereotyping, men also are becoming increasingly categorised. They today tend to be more agressive, dominant and adventurous in behaviour, with their 'jobs' in the video being very 'masculine' i.e firemen, rockstars etc, while the women are more likely to be representing 'feminine' jobs such as waitresses, secretaries and air hostesses. In the music video 'Womanizer' by Britney Spears, she dresses up as all three of these, in order to show how objectified women can be, especially to 'womanizing' types of men;

In my music video, I will be representing both male and females, but in a way that will promote the video without forcing the actors to 'get naked'. The male will be the singer, Ben, but instead of him objectifying the female, Lucy, in the video, he will be 'chasing' or following her, as she continues to evade him, much unlike many of the women in the modern music videos, who appear to make themselves easy to obtain. Lucy will act as a mysterious, etheral character who is always just out of Ben's grasp, contradicting the Mulvey theory, as she will appear as neither 'whore' or 'innocent', but dream-like and unreal