Music Video Analysis 1-Roar by Katy Perry

 What's here?

So in music videos we see an awful lot of stuff but what does it all have to do with the lyrics we can hear behind them,  and more to the point why are most of them so gripping?

Well that all comes from the idea of the emphasis. Most of the time there are certain aspects of either the artist or the song itself, Katy Perry is a good way to show off this idea. One thing that's prominent throughout the video is the artist herself and that comes from the idea of star iconography where the artist shows in the video in order to sell the artist themselves as well as the song in order to generate traffic and profits .

 In this video there's a lot of visuals to do with the jungle which reinforces the visuals of the actual lyrics themselves. This comes from the idea of Illustration which plays a big part in the what I have called "The Big 3" of music video production where you make a choice while making the visuals to go alongside the song, the more general one is called Illustration that I have mentioned earlier where you do roughly no more than show a visual interpretation of the lyrics to the song. This can help in planning as you can make a better structure as you have clear point of reference when creating as you can match a change in scene to the beat.

Now as I mentioned earlier there is a big thing in this type of video called star iconography but this idea plays into a bigger one that's used an awful lot with femlae artists called the male gaze, I think I have spoken about it in a previous post (Mulvey And The Media) but I'll give a quick summary, its the basic idea that showing women in suggestive positions gives more attention to the piece being viewed.

Here may not be an obvious example of the idea of the male gaze but it does give a good look at what I mean, now at first the idea looks to be drawing attention to the monkey holding the piece of fruit but that's before the artist comes on screen.

The POV of the shot is the tiger which gives us further emphaisis that who weire meant to be looking st is the artist herself, one of the signature parts of a woman that men look at is their legs. This has been portrayed in the media to a large amount but it leads to a good point hat while we exepect that there's a lot of revealing clothing but this seems to follow more the actual tracking of the gaze itself rather than the simple stereotype of the idea.

Now there's not just theories behind the idea but genres too, and for this there could be a few that you might think of but for music videos the idea is different, you apply it more in terms for a music artist so if you think it could be a stadium for a concert that gets used or it could be on location such as a performance on the Empire Stadium. Following that we can tell that ebyond the song there's actually a story behind what we can see therefore this video becomes a narrative, which emans that while we can get the base enjoyment of the fun of the video there's also a clear structure that helps to connect the visuals on screen to the audience as they then subtly become invested behinf the story that the cideo is telling.

There's more surrounding the video itself and that's a narrative, specifically a performance narrative. This tells a story through the performance of the artist, if you listen to the lyrics there's a contrast between the performance of the star and the actual song itself. Using this in the video is a way of amplifying the lyrics in a different method as having the star acting brings your attention to certain points of the song. This links into a further amplification of the songs lyrics through having the artists face open at all times so we can see the lip sync which helps to give the song a strong point, this use of emphasis is reinforced by the use of edits between scenes.

There are parts of this video too that show exploration and have both characters in the beginning dressed is a stereotype explorer outfit while they move through the jungle exploring, this could be an intertextual reference to Indiana Jones. Looking at the male character seen on the screenshot to the left bares a resembelence to the popular character in his costume style and the environment around Katy Perry as the video goes on and she begins to discover more and more about where she is. However as much as there's an intertextual reference to the character Indiana Jones during the start of the video sequence the rest of the video has a similar thread to Lara Croft for the lead, her outfit and overall personality are similar to that of the character which help to bring together the idea of the cideo being about exploration and survival.