The extract opens up with a narrative of the artist arguing with his manager in a shop, the clothing used for the mise-en-scene is a uniform for the guy and a formal suit for the girl, which indicated the audience what roles these characters are going to be playing in this particular video. In this case we are shown that the artist is playing an ordinary guy working on a late shift in a shop.
The music starts playing as the next scene opens and the artist goes for the fire exit to take drugs on his night shift, which is clearly showing that he is not following the law and while he’s at work. This scene is mixed with narrative which is based on his illusions in the shop while he’s working and there also is performance which is him performing with two well exposed women by his side. These are all great examples of a stereotype Hip Hop music video, such as not following instructions, taking drugs and nude women to show their power. However this video is quite unique due to the fact that the main artist has all the typical facts of hip hop music videos but doesn’t portray the artist as very wealthy as its usually portrayed, it only has a wide use of his name around the shop throughout the shots used and the exposed women dancing around with his name on the packaging in front of a whole wall of the shop filled with boxes that have his name on it, this is possibly the way of showing his power as an artist in this video.
As the scenes continue to show his imagination coming into an illusion, a lot of the shots are edited in a fast pace to match the music which quite fast. This makes the video very interesting and effective which is most likely to keep the audience attention and probably make the audience want to see the video again, this is a very important issue that I will be needing to look at as a lot of hip hop music videos loose audience quite quickly.
As the exposed women dance next to the stocked shelves its as if the women are portrayed as products in the shop, which is degrading to women as almost all of hip hop videos illustrate this image of females. However the manager of the shop is a female which makes this different harder to figure out the meaning behind this, because she’s there at the beginning telling him of and she’s there at the end catching him messing around at work. This gradually indicates the audience that when was going through the illusion stage the women wore portrayed as he was the boss and they admired him, however as he comes back to reality his manager is the woman and she’s the one in charge. The setting at these part of the scenes are quite clear, when he is on his own and is in use of drugs he dreams of in his own world the lighting changes from natural lights which portray the reality to artificial yellow toned lighting that make the scenes look better to portray his imagination as everything is more attractive in that perspective but it’s all just his imagination.
To get a more successful hip-hop music video I would have to consider the stereotypical views of the hip hop culture, this would make my music video more professional as I am concentrating on this specific genre. And therefore to be successful with my final product I would have to include these views and study an existing music video such as this one by Kig Kudi.
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