Excellent Gentlemen lyrics

Verse 1

From the time that we met baby

I could tell you had things that a guy like me needs

You didn’t have to front to make an impression

Though my feelings followed you through a natural progression

Now you hold all my dreams inside this too/tool

So I wish I could lay beside/inside of you

It’s your personality that I miss when you’re gone

So strong I gotta sing a song

Baby x 4

Chorus

Girl this is just to show I care about you

And you can guess these things that I wanna do with you

Wish that it could be that you were here with me

Baby you gotta believe

Verse 2

I didn’t know baby

The effect of your love on me

Don’t you know I still see the light?

No matter how far apart we could be

Chorus. 

Artist profile

Excellent Gentleman

Band Members: Jefferson Sechs, Steveland Swatkins, David Valentine, Dominic Phenomenal and PJ Snaxx
Genre: R&B/Soul/Funk
Location: Oregon, America
Been Active Since: 2009 


Excellent Gentlemen plays danceable, vocal soul r&b music. Think '70s block parties and the foundations of golden-age hip-hop records. Their music stands for positivity, love, happiness and getting sexy; this is definitely NOT the drudgery of mediocre Indie-Rock. Their adopted home of Portland, OR has welcomed with open arms the injection of real live dance party music played by real live musicians. On the strength of their incredible live show, the independently-run band has ignited an adoring fan base and has become the hot touring funk act in the Pacific Northwest.

Blog 8: Star Theory Richard Dyer

Richard Dyer says that artists are made through artificial images such as advertising, films, magazines and music. Claiming that consumers prefer artists to portray their true emotions and not be be made into an fake image by their record labels. Record labels have to market their artists into the different target audiences that suits them all individually.


Dyers main theory is that artist are trendsetters, who get their audience to copy their images. From their hair style to the way they dress. Cultural and religious beliefs can also gain the artist more audiences, if they are shared.  Personal lives of the artist, which has been made easier to access by the media, shows them as real people which makes them easier to be related to their audiences. 

Kanye West is an example of this, as back in 2008 he brought shutter shades into trend, which everyone knew him for. These shades were the highlight of his Glow in the Dark tour. Everyone was wearing these shades in different colours. Although Kanye West got his influence from Sho'Nuff, Kanye was the one who made it mainstream at least for 6 months straight.

Stars then support hegemony and the dominant ideology of society. Gramsci who is known for his cultural hegemony theory, says how the different states use their mainstream cultural institutions to control their power in a capitalist society. 

The music industry makes and promotes different artists in different genres to act according to the genre stereotype, this could also relate to their gender and race. 



The female identity issues are raised when it comes to Britney Spears, in pop music. As she was viewed a a role model for teenage girls. Britney's identity as a female was automatically placed in the male dominated industry, which showed her as a stereotype of femininity. 'Girle iconography' surrounded Britney when she was first known in the pop industry. With stereotypical female things such as make-up, dolls and hanging out, the teenage pigtails added to the innocent school girl image. her choreographed dance routines made you want to be a part of her gang.

However it can be argued that the innocence being shown is being manipulated into sexuality. Meaning she is being actually being exploited, and it isn’t empowering but degrading. 

Laura Mulvey's theory on the male gaze criticises that women are sexualised by males through the male gaze. Men are active while females are oppressed and seen as passive. The audience are forced to identify with the male gaze, which leads on to the triple gaze. 

Britney Spears overprotected, represents how she feels with the music industry. She feels overprotected in the sense that she doesn't have the freedom to do what she wants. As in what actually happens in her music career. This song was made in way to express that she is grown now and not naive anymore. She is aware of things, although still blames the music industry for the reason that she has been sheltered, it can be seen as empowering. From a gender perspective, Britney’s identity has been placed within a male-dominated industry that manufactures limited stereotypes of femininity. 

Constructed as role model in “I’m not a girl, not yet a woman”from film “Crossroads”. Rites of passage story explores tensions of growing up and passage journey from childish innocence to realities of adult life. This again shows how much she has grown up from the innocent girl the audience knew her as, to the almost woman she has become. 

This song is an example of innocence versus sexuality. The messages in this video isn't confused, as it states that again Britney isn't a young innocent girl any more. As she is doing what she wants, which is breaking a guys heart and shes having fun with it. She is warning everyone, especially men to be careful around her and not to be deceived by her past.  This is all shown through her lyrics that state 'i'm not that innocent'.  She is both being exploited and exploiting, as through her lyrics you can see that she uses her girlie cuteness to trap and hurt her lovers, she is exploiting her power over men in a bad way although it does benefit her and her sexuality. Although she is being exploited, again, through the use of the male gaze. As she is using her sexuality and body to grab the males attention. To spread her message across. When it comes to gender debates, Britney Spears’s Music Videos are a polysemic text that can be read in a number of different ways with multiple meanings. Her career has evolved from ‘Teen Princess’ with connotations of innocence and girliness to a half-naked woman who performs for a patriarchal male audience. Both identities are stereotypical visions of femininity as presented in a range of media texts.

Blog 7: Creating a brand

The aim of creating a brand is to:

Advertise
Illustrate a song
Appeal to a visual audience
Expresses an individual’s emotions
Tells a story
Market an image

In the mid-1990s Bob Herbert, Chris Herbert and Lindsey Casbon set about creating a girl group to compete with the mainstream boy bands that dominated the pop music scene in the mid- to late-1990s. They placed an advertisement in The Stage trade magazine asking if any 18–23 years old had the ability to sing and dance. As well as being streetwise, outgoing, ambitious, and dedicated. 

The spice girls clothes were all chosen for their first appearance on Americasn TV, on purpose:

• Victoria in a sophisticated slinky black number
• Emma in a baby-pink dress
• Mel B in her leopard-skin trousers
• Geri in red hot pants, top and bra
• Mel C in her favourite Liverpool shirt and tracksuit bottoms 

The Spice Girls were sold to us as a group of friends, just goofing off and making top-selling singles together.  Although in fact they were all strangers, who were picked after hundreds of auditions for a reason. They had endless merchandising and sponsorship deals, and were involved with everything from Pepsi ads to Polaroid ads to Barbie-style Spice Girls dolls.Everything about them, including their Scary/Posh/Sporty/etc. nicknames was under the control of men or corporations. Geri Halliwell “Ginger Spice” almost didn't make it into the group, because she looked older than the other girls. She used the male gaze in order to get into the group. 

Lady Gaga and Adele are two different types of artists. 

Lady Gaga who used to be a stage performer, was noticed by Akon through her vocal abilities and helped her sign a joint deal with Interscope Records and his own KonLive Distribution. Gaga rose to prominence with her debut album The Fame with global chart-topping singles such as "Just Dance" and "Poker Face".


Gaga is remembered by her flamboyant and diverse contributions to the music industry via her fashion, live performances, and music videos. June 2014 she is one of the best-selling musicians of all time. Her achievements include five Grammy Awards, 13 MTV Video Music Awards, and 11 Guinness World Records. She regularly appears on Billboard's Artists of the Year lists and Forbes' power and earnings rankings, and was named one of the world's most influential people by Time in 2010. 

Adele started singing at the age of four, that she became obsessed with voices. Adele states that the Spice Girls had a major influence in regard to her love and passion for music, saying that they made her who she is today. West Norwood is where Adele's first record, "Hometown Glory", written when she was 16. She later became interested in R&B artists such as Aaliyah, Destiny's Child and Mary J. Blige. Adele graduated from the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon where she credits the school with nurturing her talent. She is soulful artist with meaningful lyrics, compared to  Lady Gaga. 

Don't go breaking my heart

We filmed this sequence in a couple whole takes with both Leigha and Michael in the shots at once, as it helped give us a basic platform to our editing piece.  To film the shots, we played the music out loud and got Leigha and Michael to sing out loud, so it would be easier to sync in time.  The equipment used was a camera and a tripod, which enabled us to get different shots at different angles of the song. The dancing had to also be synced to the beat of the music. A lot of shot types were used which is the standard of a music video, the most used one was the close ups as it showed how the they were actually lip syncing with the music. The microphone was used as a prop to add to the music video feel, to make it more realistic. 

I edited this sequence by using different layers for different shot types. This helped make editing easier, as you could easily cut out all the bad clips with the razor, and fill it with another shot type, without the sequence losing its timed sync and tempo. 

Although this sequence was our second sequence. As our first sequence had too many mistakes, which that it made it harder to edit. There was no whole takes so the editing sequence had no basis, so when it came to editing all the bad footage out, there was no actual good footage left. This lead to my group going back out to film the whole sequence again. There is still a couple more mistakes we made in the second sequence. There wasn't a variety of shot types as there was in the first sequence. 



What I have learned from the filming the performance is that i need to apply a lot more shot types to  my final production. As it will create a special feel to the production, as repetitive shots can make it boring and easily forgotten. 

Laura Mulvey/Rihanna

 Reception theory - Stuart Hall

The texts were considered encoded with meaning, by producers and then understood by audiences. 

Meaning/Message                                                                       Audience Decodes


Producer 
encodes                          ---->                                              Dominant or preferred 
meaning in                     ---->                                              Negotiated 
the text                           ---->                                              Oppositional 





Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist, is a professor of film and media at the university  of Birkbeck. She published an influential journal screen entitled Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.  Laura Mulvey argues that we live in a patrier theory of the male gaze states that the camera focuses on male characters who sexualise females.  This is called the triple gaze when the camera is optical as well as libidinal.  The three levels are stated as camera, character and spectator. 

An example of the triple gaze is in the the film Dr No. This shows the audience viewing the camera, that is watching Sean Connery watch Ursula Andress. Urusula Andress is half naked in her bikini being sexualised by Sean which agree's with Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze. 




Another example of the male gaze is in the Transformers film which shows the thriple gaze. Where Megan Fox was also sexualised as she wore little clothing and bend all over the car trying to fix it, as Shia LeBoeuf was watching her as an sexual object. 



We as an audience are compelled to watch these films from the male gaze as we have no choice. This can be a problem to the female audience, as they may feel disgust envy or annoyance in the way woman are shown. And in some cases just want to be like them. This all happens in the process of suture. 





Suture 


Classical Hollywood narrative uses editing, sound, narrative and mise-en-secene. This helps position the audience unconsciously reading the film in a certain way. This is reception theory as the audience do not have any control.  The audience 'stitches' its self into a film relating to its characters. 


Women with agency in Mainstream cinema:

• Alien/aliens - Ripley

• Hunger games - Katriss Everdeen 

• Kill Bill - The bride 

• Tom 6 Raider - Cara croft 

• Lucy - Scarlet Johannson  

Laura Mulvey argues that women are either being seen as an object of erotic desire for the characters, or an object of erotic desire for the audience. 







Although it doesn't always have to be this way, as Casino Royale, both genders are being presented equally in sexuality. In which the female audience reacted in a positive light with this. 



Rihanna's Shut up and Drive video is supports Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze. 



The video starts of with a flashy expensive Ferrari with Rihanna starting to step out of the car, which then shows the bottom of her high heels in medium shot. Which shows from the very beginning she is being sexualised. 


She then begins to 'fix' the car by bending and wiping the car with the towel, which also ends up around her neck. This holds the male gaze and is showing her as a sexual object, especially when she shakes her bum. 





She does more bending of her body, in which the camera shows in medium long shot to show how she is fixing the car in a sexy way for the male gaze. Which in real life, this is not how cars are being fixed. 
Her leather jacket and short shorts reperesent that more of her sexuality, but not in an almost innocent way like before. This shoes her more bad side to her as she lets the men race the cars she just fixed. 

Blog 6: Key Features of a Pop video

Whether videos are primarily performance-based, narrative-based or concept-based. It’s about how the elements for each one are used. Goodwin’s categories can be used to analyse music videos.

Illustrate - Music videos can use a set of images to illustrate the meaning of lyrics & genre, this is the most common

Amplify - This is similar to repeatability. Meanings and effects are manipulated and constantly shown through the video and drummed into our vision

Disjuncture - This is where the meaning of the song is completely ignored. 

We only a gist of the meaning of the song and then make up our own idea of what is being told. Goodwin explains that music videos should ignore common narrative. It is important in their role of advertising. Music videos should have coherent repeatability. Narrative and performance work hand in hand. It makes it easier for the audience to watch over and over without losing interest. The artist acting as both narrator & participant helps to increase the authenticity however the lip synch and other mimed actions remains the heart of music videos. The audience need to believe this is real. 

A Commissioner from a record label sends a track to 5-10 directors. The directors then each submit a treatment. This stage is unpaid. The director who has submitted the best treatment is then commissioned to make the video. Only then is the director paid.

The reason this music video is regarded as important as it was the first music video to really have an impact on sales, after the video release the song went to number one. It can also be seen as a work of art. 

When it was released as a single, Bohemian Rhapsody became a commercial success staying at the top of the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and selling more than a million copies in 1976. It reached number one again in 1991 for five weeks following Mercury's death, it then became the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It topped the charts in several other markets as well Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and The Netherlands. In the United States the song originally peaked at number nine in 1976. It returned to the chart at number two in 1992 following its appearance in the film Wayne's World, which made it popular.

Although critical reaction was initially mixed, Bohemian Rhapsody remains one of Queen's most popular songs and is placed on modern lists of the greatest songs of all time. In 2004 it was made into the Grammy Hall of Fame. 

Blog 5: Pop video

Andrew Goodwin in Dancing in the Distraction Factory (1992) has identified the following features of music videos.

Music videos show genre characteristics, from the stage performances in metal videos to dance routines for boy/girl band. There are relationships between the lyrics and visuals, either through illustrative, amplifying and contradicting. The demands of record labels would also include the need for lots of close-ups of the artist, so they can develop motifs which recur across their work in a visual style and helps them become more memorable. There is frequently reference to the notion of looking through screens within screens for example telescopes. This is mostly through the particularly voyeuristic treatment of the female body in music videos. There is often intertextual reference to films, TV programmes, and other music videos.  

Laura Mulvey’s theory relates to classical Hollywood cinema, it can be applied to music videos. Mulvey states that women are sexualised as male erotic desires; this is called the male gaze. In film and audience men are active, while women are passive. Women do not have any agency, meaning they don’t move the plot forward. The audience is forced to identify with male gaze. Cinema reflects the patriarchal society we live in. 

Camera work:  angle - high or low; long, medium or close up; over the shoulder - point of view, tracking, pan, steadycam.

Editing: speed (long or short take); Style – straight cut, dissolve, fade, wipe, jump cut.

Mise en Scene: setting/location, props; hair/make up/costume; positioning of characters in frame; body language/facial expression; colour; lighting – high or low.

Relation of Visuals to Song

Goodwin's categories can help analyse music videos. These are the different ways of promoting a song. 



Illustrate: uses sets of images to paint the meaning of the genre and lyrics. This is the most used way.

Amplify: uses repeatability which manipulates and repeats the same meaning throughout the music video, all the time.

Disjuncture: the lyrics and meaning of the whole song is ignored throughout.




Although a lot of music videos do not give any narrative. This leads to the audience making up their own meaning and narrative to the song, instead of being shown what it is.  Godwin does say that in order for songs to be advertised, artists should stay away from common narrative videos.

Music video's should have clear repeatability, as it makes the audience more interested into the music video for a longer time.  

Potential Tracks

0 Not my day - It matters

Not My Day are extremely proud that two of our songs have been chosen for the soundtrack of Philip Pullman's forthcoming feature film 'The Butterfly Tattoo'! 

The producers have picked 'Stronger Than Any' and 'Happiness Will Spell The End' to each play over two important montage scenes during the movie.
'The Butterfly Tattoo' will be premiered at the Cannes Film Festival next May, but you can see a teaser trailer now by visiting here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TTu0EWG3tmoWG3tmo   (www.unsigned.com) 

This could be a good track for a music video as the beat is quite fast meaning that it will be easy for us to lip sync. 


Excellent Gentlemen

Growing up together in New York forged a bond between these musicians that is evident in their lock-tight pockets and seemingly telepathic stage interactions. From their roots in the East coast neo-soul and hip-hop communities, these friends have forged a signature sound that is steeped in vitality and celebration. (Unsigned.com)

Genre of characteristics

Music Video's show a genre of characteristics.  This is proposed by Andrew Godwin. 

Relationships are created between lyrics and visuals. As they also contradict and illustrate. 

The Pompeii video does have similarities to the lyrics. As there are many locations that are visited. This is shown through the low wide angles which show the open space and make the character smaller, as he feels and is alone. Every scene the character is by himself  looking for someone. 

Demands of the records ensure that music video have a lot of close ups, as well as the artists having their own certain visual style. 
There is a constant reference to the impulse of  looking at screens and telescopes. Which is a bit of a voyeuristic treatment of the female body.  Laura Mulvey would agree with this, as she believes that men gaze at women as "objects of erotic desire". 

In the Jennifer Lopez booty video, herself and Iggy Azalea are in swimming suits shaking their bodies with different fast close ups on their female parts. This supports Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze, as women are sexually portrayed for the male attention. 



The blurred lines video doesn't fit in with lyrics. As there are just three girls barely clothed dancing around Robin Thicke, Pharrell and T.I. This again supports the male gaze theory, the women are just sexual objects to look pretty. While the men are all dressed up in actual suits.