Genre Conventions

My chosen genre for a music video is Rock Music. Although my chosen song is quite a soft rock song, it still falls into this genre, and will therefore follow the conventions. Rock music started off as 'rock n roll' in the 1950s, originally associated with rebellion. The lyrics of rock songs will have a variety of topics, ranging from the stress of romantic love, as well as choosing more serious themes such as social or political barriers and how they can be broken.

Jason Mittell said that when media producers create a text they use codes and conventions that make cultural references to their target audience's knowledge of society- in rock music the convention is usually to break the societal norms, and rebel against what is expected of them. Throughout time genre has evolved with the era that the media text is created in, the genre will have the same generic themes but make it contemporary to fit with the time it was created in (Steve Neale). Therefore using this theory to explain my chosen song ("Imagine- John Lennon"), it could be said that Lennon wanted to rebel against the racial, political and social barriers that he felt were present at the time. He wass trying to express his dream of a 'utopian' hyper reality where there are no prejudices that he feel are the cause of the problems in the society he lived in at the time. Despite this song been written over 40 years ago, the genre, and conventions of the genre, has not changed. Therefore I can still use the conventions of rock music to express the message Lennon was trying to spread when he wrote the song. The audience can use the genre and the conventions of it to decide if it is a media text that they want to consume.


In regards to more modern rock music, the term 'social realism' has been used. This means that rock music artists now are trying to present working class people, way of life, and our current society, in a more realistic way; by using realistic settings, locations (specifically urban locations), economic hardship, life struggles and other things. Artists such as Jake Bugg and Arctic Monkeys are doing this in their videos.
For example, in the Arctic Monkey's music video 'Leave Before The Lights Come On', the mise-en-scene in this video is very realistic and portrays a realistic view of working class life- including the main woman in it clearly experiencing life struggles as she wishes to kill herself), the shops may not be the classiest of shops, and the people used may be actors but they are portrayed in an everyday, realistic way- no fancy accessories, clothes etc. Therefore making it more relatable for the audience (which would most likely be in this class, and would therefore appreciate the realism of the video).