Popular Music and Sexuality

Sexuality must be considered when analysing any music. It is the driving force behind much music. Sexuality connects the fans with the artist, whether they are of the same sex or not or the same sexuality or not. Music is for many people a way of releasing their feelings, and a way to maybe understand their feelings – this may also help others. Music is a massive part of teenagers lives and by them listening to artists who are trying to communicate messages of sexuality it not only builds on their understanding, but may actually affect their own feelings. Popular music becomes a way for people to communicate their sexuality.

Human sexuality has 5 main elements:

    Cognitive/intellectual

    Emotional – the need to give, receive love

    Physical – the need for skin contact

-   Moral

-   Social – sexuality gives us identity and makes us feel wanted

Popular music both rhythmic and verbal content allows people to explore their sexuality whether they are with a partner or behind a computer screen. A lot of pop music lyrics are about receiving and giving love – the emotional side of sexuality.  Pop music also includes dance which is commonly used for sexual acts.

Popular music also allows non-straight artists are able to toy with sexuality and express how they are feeling either by writing songs or just singing about their sexuality. For example Elton John, Boy George, Lady Gaga. Popular music is an important part of teenagers lives and they are exposed to many music videos which show sexual attraction. Music provides a way of teenagers to learn about love, pain and identity.

In our promo we may decide to communicate a message to our target audience. We must consider sexuality when we are filming our video. It may not be the main focus (as there may not be a love attraction) or it may be the one thing that we want to draw on. Nowadays so much sexuality in music videos is being shown. I feel that if we are targeting to a teenage audience then we might want to show something different to what they are used to seeing, I’m not sure how we could do this yet, but thinking about ideas and reading this article has made me get quite excited now!

A background to the Music Industry and some basic theory

Genres are constantly being created, crossed and revisited. Pop music is the one that is most dependent on genre. Each of the genres has unique musical characteristics. It’s not only the music that is associated with the genres; there are other factors such as hair and clothes. Also it depends on the genre where they perform, as this could be for example at festivals or on the radio.

Here is a list of just a few of the genres that music can fall into:

   Pop

   Hip-Hop

   Dance

   Rock

   Country/Western

   R&B

   Jazz

   Many more…

A stars image is very important for categorising them because people see them before they start singing/playing. As soon as the audience sees the artist they should be able to know what to expect from the artist. An artist must be represented visually in their videos and photos etc. This makes sure that they really do fit into their genre. Look can be as manufactured as sound. Music videos show what genre the artists fall into. For example all-boy bands usually have dance moments in the video, they are in places that are quite urban and they usually have a love interest in the songs (Westlife, One Direction).

When reading this article I was looking at what was said about Adele and how her image is created to show that she is serious, quite old school which goes back to the 60’s. I was interested to look at another woman artist and decided to just take the image of Nicki Minaj. Nicki Minajs image is a very important part of her music. She is seen as a fashion icon because of the unique, colourful and daring outfits that she wears. In an interview discussing her sexual image Minaj said, 'The female rappers of my day spoke about sex a lot… and I thought that to have the success they got, I would have to represent the same thing. When in fact I didn’t have to represent the same thing.'

She actually made a decision to ‘tone down the sexiness’. Minaj is trying to compete with the male rappers. And in a song ‘Moment 4 life’ she refers to herself as a ‘king’, not queen. By her image being so out there it shows how she is really trying to empower women.

When I am thinking about my promo pack I will take a lot of the information from this article. Just by looking at an image it should be clear what genre the artist is from. This therefore needs to be shown in my artist. The image and music should go together completely and there should be no contradictory factors. When looking at what song to use we must really understand the message of the song and what genre of music it is from so that we can show this in the video. The genre should be shown in the video, and the stars image. 

Lip Sync Exercise

In class we did a lip sync using the song 'Price Tag' by Jessie J. This exercise taught us the technique that we would use next year when making our own music videos. We had a whole morning - 3 hours, to do this task. We shot three different shot types using an F3 camera - a different camera to what we used for our thrillers. Then we had to cut and edit the video to make a video which had the original track by Jessie J on it. We had to make sure that the people miming to the song were in time with the real version. One of the problems we found was that some of us (we used the people in our groups to be in the video so that all of us got a go on the camera) didn't actually sing the song out-loud as they just lip sun git, there was a real difference in how it looked. It looked a lot more accurate and realistic when the people actually sand the song out loud. This is an important factor to remember for next year when we are making our music videos.

For the three different shot types we did a tracking shot, a shot in-front of the green screen and a shot in-front of what looked like a living room (wallpaper and fireplace). It really made a difference to what the background was - and movement made the video a lot more interesting. The tracking shot was the most challenging for both the singer and the person pushing along the camera- as the singer and camera had to be going at exactly the same speed so that they were inline with each-other. Although it was the most challenging it was also the most impressive. Also by walking along it made me (as the singer) more comfortable as I had a beat to walk along to and it was less daunting than just standing there in-front of the camera. We also did 3 different shot types in-front of each background - mid shots, close ups etc.. There was studio etiquette - we had roles. Someone did the turn over, someone was the floor manager and someone did the playback.

When editing we dragged 10 clips that we thought we could use into the timeline. We first dragged the original song onto the timeline so that this was the base that we synced the videos to. In the song there were three beats at the beginning - this made sure that we could line up each of the shots to the base track accurately. We made sure that we cut to a beat so that it got cut neatly. This is also the convention used in most music videos. We used arrow keys on the computer to make sure that we got the beat bang on (so we had to listen out for that carefully). I found this exercise very useful as I am now confident that I would be able to makes sure a video had no out of time singing. I also feel it helped me be more confident in my ability to edit videos together which is a skill that I will need next year for our music video.