The music video that I am analyzing is “Bongo Jam” this music video was produced by the Crazy Cousinz. The genre characteristic that this music video belongs to is funky house. The broad characteristics of this genre show men in power, big house, half naked woman dancing around the men and blinging jewelery which is stereotypical of a funky house genre.
The relationship between the lyrics and the visual show that the lyrics are emphasizing the visual, as the lyrics say “sometimes I wake up in the morning” the artist wakes up with girls next to him in his bed. The lyrics also say, “to play my bongos” and you can see him gesturing tapping on the female actors chests, which references to him tapping bongos, to further more clarify it there are scenes of him tapping actual bongos with the previous scenes with the actors chests. As the scene carries the use of representation of women as subjects also carry on as the artist is shown to have the power to pick the girls he want like a products in shops. All these are typical views of the funky house genre, which are shown in this video. The girls he chooses have to help him with his daily routines such as brushing teeth…etc referencing the girls as his slaves. However the girls emotions about the actions they are forced to do are clear through close-up shots of the girls faces, this is also used on him to show his clear happiness. While all this is happening there is also rapid shots of Calista singing as she is featured in this song, however she is not compared to the other girls in the video as she has shots on her own and she is dressed normally with a black dress, this shows her power as an artist however she isn’t shown that much as she is only a feature in the song.
Even though there are very degrading shots and references towards women, the representation seems to be not as typical as it usually is as Calista also says, “I love to play my bongos in the morning” and looks at the man dancing around her playing actual bongos. This illustrates her power as an artist just like men are typically portrayed in this genre; this shows us that as an artist you have the power no matter what gender you are.
Then towards the end of the video the main artists wakes up to his friend waking him up because he is sleeping while he should be cleaning the house he was dreaming he lived in, his dream was portrayed with a fade of black around the video shots throughout until the end as he wakes up. And now as the audience we see why he was dreaming of all the girls instead of doing the usual actions such as seductively dancing around him with a lot of interest, they were still seductive but they were cleaning the house and their emotions towards him wore not so pleasing as they showed no interest in him even in his dream. We can also now see why he as the man with all the power was so shocked and overly happy to be next to all these girls in his house, when usually they are portrayed as calm as they are used to these actions and showing emotions towards this is illustrated as weakness. Which he was shown as throughout the video.
As I was analyzing the video these are the main points I picked out which are very good examples of the funky house genre, this has helped he understand the image portrayed in usual funky house videos even though this video is shown in a unique way it still shows how a typical funky house video would look and what audience would expect it to look as it’s natural.
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