Desire Video Analysis

The song Desire, by Dance-Pop group Years and Years is a dance pop song made up from many intrigueing lyrics, for example ‘Where are you taking me? I want you to want me again’ are lyrics that people can relate to. The emotional rollercoaster of a relationship, where you are wishing for someone to desire you as much as you desire them. The lyrics, being so versatile make them connectable to people, and also are great to be played with that type of dance music as people can sing the lyrics to their friends and really relate to them. The song would be completely different if the lyrics were the same but the music was a ballad form, the true emotion within the lyrics would be revealed.

The video shows a chaotic, sexual relationship and the lyrics clearly represent the confusion between emotions that the characters are feeling, they imply that they don’t know whether they have feelings of love or lust.

There are other lyrics throughout the music video such as ‘I must be tough’ which shows how relationships can tear people such as the singer down, therefore they need to be tough emotionally to handle the relationship.

The music video of Desire is made up of a mixture of mid shots, close ups and establishing shots. The camera includes many horizontal movements of the camera, panning to the various different shots. These help to draw the narrative together.

There are shots of the band members, such as Olly Alexander are used to show him as a type writer. After close ups are used to show him typing ‘the end’ repetitively which shows how consuming the emotion can be to feel.

Editing is used in the video to create emotion within the video. For example the colour scheme of the video is very dark and blue which connotes sadness and confusion which is shown throughout by the lyrics in the music video such as ‘your love only gets me abused’ which shows emotional heartache and pain due to love.

Case Study: Years and Years

• Years & Years are an all-male trio who were founded originally as a five piece, British electronica band in London. The band is made up of the keyboard playing frontman and lead singer Olly Alexander, Mikey Goldsworthy who plays bass guitar and Emre Türkmen who also plays keyboard. The two past members are Noel Leeman and Olivier Subria. Their music has been thought of as being electropop, whilst being mixed with 1990s house and R&B sounds. Genres attached to the them include synthpop, indie pop and electronica. This is a result of their influences who include the dance music producers Flying Lotus, Diplo, Jai Paul and Radiohead.
• Years & Years have become more successful with each music release. After releasing three singles, the band impressed Polydor Records, a britsh record label and company operating as part of the Universal Music Group. This resulted in them signing to the label and relasing their fourth single under them, "Take Shelter." This resulted in their EP reaching number one on the iTunes UK Singles Electronic Chart.
• In January 2015, their sixth single called King was previewed on BBC Radio 1. One of the radio hosts Zane Lowe named it the Hottest Record of the day. In the same month they also won a prestigious award, the BBC Sound of 2015 award. In March of that year, their single was also a success as it reached number one on the UK singles chart. Then on the 18th their success grew with an announcement of their first album, "Communion."
• It ended up also reaching number 1 when it entered the UK Albums Chart. They have also won many awards including MTVu's Artist To Watch Award in 2014 and Gaffa's Best New International Artist Act and Attitude's Album of the Year awards in 2015. 

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Audience Theory: Life Matrix Theory

I have created a Pixton with captions and images to easily explain the Life Matrix. I have applied the Life Matrix theory to my groups potential song choice - Desire by Years and Years. Due to the genre, being a dance/ pop song, I believe that our audience for this song will be people who fit into the tribe wired or fun/atics categories. I think this because the song is connected to the young as the style of music is synth based and young people like mainstream chart music. Years and Years' previous song 'King' reached number one in the chart. The kind of music they make is typical of the club song.

 

Audience Theory: Uses and Gratifications Theory

Here I made a spider diagram of Bulmer and Katz uses and gratifications theory which will be useful when thinking about the audience of our Music Video.

Audience Theory: Two Step Flow Theory

The two-step flow model was first presented by Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet in the 1944 study, The People’s Choice. It focused on how people made decisions during the campaign for Presidents. It was surprising to them that they found out informal and personal associates were mentioned much more than being exposed to newspaper or radio sources as influences on voting behaviour. By gaining this data, theorists Katz and Lazarsfeld created the two-step flow theory of mass communication.

This theory focuses on the belief that the media influences people in two different stages. The first one involves people known as opinion leaders. They are attentive to the mass media and receive messages from it. Then, they pass on their own beliefs on this content to associates who are less effective and they have influence over. Therefore, members of the audience receive information from the media with the thoughts and ideas expressed by the opinion leaders, which means they aren’t directly influenced, it happens in a two-step flow. The researchers believed this diminished the media’s power and resulted in them concluding that social factions were importantly related to how audiences interpreted texts too. This is often known as the limited effects paradigm.

“Personal influence” is a term which was created in reference to this process which exists between the media’s messages and the audience’s reaction to it. The researchers learnt that the opinion leaders can be influential in getting people to change their thoughts and behaviours and are similar to those who become influenced. This theory has helped to improve our knowledge on how the mass media influence how we make decisions. It helped us to understand why particular media campaigns may fail to change the audiences’ behaviour and helps us to predict the influence of media messages on people’s behaviour.

It is therefore beneficial to helping my group and I create our music video as it implies we should think about how different opinion leaders may interpret the messages and themes within our video and how they could inform less active audience members about it. To avoid any negativity it emphasises that we should avoid including controversial scenes like alcohol or drug references as the belief that we endorse anything illegal could be incorrectly believed and spread to other people. However, it also shows that if we produce a video with positive themes in a professional way it could result in optimistic views on it being spread to lots of people and they may be influenced to believe in them too.