Lily Perkins

Professor Bill Ivey

Foundations of Art and Design

March 21, 2018

 

REFLECTIVE ESSAY

 

Within the first video by My Bloody Valentine, it opens up with an extremely desaturated girl dancing to the sound of an electric guitar. As the majority of popular music today has a very specific format, this music goes outside the realm of normativity, and distracts me the viewer in a unique way. Through the use of blended and loosely dictated vocals, the music comes across as extraordinarily psychedelic, which would cause the viewer to get a sense of out-of-placeness and experience the music in a way they most likely haven’t before. This blended dialogue mirrors the effects and lighting of the video. With a white background causing the people within the video to blend in to the point where you only see basic features, this could symbolize the idea of humanity erasing itself into nothingness. This is further emphasized through the lyrics, “Soon/That (I’ll harm you” within the second verse and the third verse, “Come back/Have faith/Someone like you/Can find the reason/Of what I did to you/Yeah yeah”; as humans are the only creature to possess a sense of morality, the idea that is being portrayed within the song that a person is murdering or killing, shows that humans can and will distance themselves from their compassion even if they are murdering and using love as an excuse to do so. One shot within the video showed a close-up of an eye, which further proves my assumption, as the eye can be a metaphorical window to the soul, thus the person is blurring themselves to a sense where their souls can barely be distinguished from their surroundings.

As the video opens, the first scene to appear within the music video by Cocteau Twins is what appears to be the inside of a blue seashell of some sort. This scene fades out to reveal a sky above trees, which have been heavily edited to make the sunlight dance gayly across the screen with a multitude of colors. As the video is very non-linear, it is emphasized through the word choice within the lyrics, which are also quite non-linear. The colors are bright and flashy, and as there is a multitude of layers of images, this causes the viewer to experience elation and a build-up of sporadic emotions, similar to what one would feel when one is in love. Throughout the song, the repeated lyrics of “And we can make love” and “We’re covered by the sacred fire” emphasize this, especially when many of the scenes are repeated, showing a recurrence of the experiences this person is feeling. Similarly, when the singer says at the end and towards the beginning of the song “And we can go”, the close-up image of a bird in flight is shown, providing the feeling again of elation yet this time with a sense of calmness for the viewer.

Within the last song, De Luxe, written by Lush, it appears to be written that the “main characters” within the song are on a playground or park doing drugs. Through the lyrics “No incentive to hide/Happy coursing through my veins/Don’t even know my name/When I’m up you’re coming down”, “Some sight to feel our earthly bed”, “Paper flowers bring me luck”, and “Grass in my thighs my aching legs”, it is clear that she is high on drugs within the song and while she is still euphoric, the person she is with is having the drugs start to wear off. This could also be a metaphor for getting high “on life” while the people around her are trying to drag her down. As the first scene is of flames growing larger and larger, this shows the person’s growing determination and “fire”, as her lack of care at the opinions of others are emphasized with the lyric, “No incentive to hide”. There is, like the previous song, a multitude of colors and layering, especially with the lights playing across people’s faces. The specific part of the circles on a woman’s face appearing to the timing of the music is interesting, and briefly impacts a sense of order in the chaos of the song and lighting to the viewer. Beginning with fire and choosing the last scene to be one of the woman slowly fading into water, this slows the tempo of the video and song, and leads the viewer to grow calm following the frenzy of emotions impacted on them throughout the majority of the video.

Throughout all three music videos, light, color, and image layering was highly used in order to emphasize the emotions and feelings perceived by the lyrics. Without such unique and intense imagery and editing, the overall opinions and understandings gathered from the videos would not have been as accurate nor as complex, as such mirrors the human psyche.