Use of Narrative

Generally, in most of the ‘Alternative Rock’ music videos that I have watched, the majority of the screen-time is taken up by the band performance. In quite a few videos, there isn’t any narrative at all, thus leaving the music and the physical playing of instruments to tell the implied story. The lack of visual narrative is intentional, and done deliberately to direct the viewer(s) attention to the band’s playing of their instruments. In the music video for ‘Blue Flame’, by Alice Nine, the editing focuses on the band, and their instruments.

This is done to allow the instruments, and the music to influence the creations of mental images in the viewer(s) -- songs of this genre, generally, have a lot of emotion in them, thus making it easy to do this. A good example of a music video that completely lets the band’s performance tell the story would be MoNoLith’s video for their song, ‘Byakuya’.

In this video, there are a lot of close-up and extreme close-up shots of the vocalists’ faces, and the instrument-players playing their respective instruments. The close-ups are used to show the emotional expressions on the band members’ faces -- it is from these shots that the viewer(s) interpret the meaning of the song. The GazettE’s, ‘The Invisible Wall’ music video is another example of this lack of narrative.

Although, in this video, visual images have been used to help convey the meaning of the song. They are subtle, and sometimes combined with the band’s performance, but, they are there. This is therefore another technique of conveying a meaning via means other than narrative-use; subtly combining the band’s performance with visual images that help the viewer(s) to understand the implied story, or to help them interpret the song and video in their own way.

With this being said, the narrative is not useless, nor is it insignificant or weak. For example, in The GazettE’s other video, for their song, ‘Guren’; the narrative is very powerful. It is common in music videos of this genre for the narrative to be powerful, because the band’s performance usually has the majority of the screen-time.

One is relatively easily able to interpret that in the video for ‘Guren’, The GazettE’s lead singer, Ruki, is singing from a woman’s perspective, and is singing about the miscarriage of a baby. The narrative of the music video is both powerful and effective as it successfully conveys the overall implication of the song. The young girl inside the red-painted room represents the baby in the womb; whilst the gradual whitening of the room represents the baby dying, and ultimately, the baby’s death by the end of the video, at which point the room has been painted white and the girl is wearing a white dress rather than a red dress. On top of all this, the band’s performance takes place inside the same room as the narrative.

Overall, ‘Alternative Rock’ music videos, and its variant genres, focus more on the band’s performance and their playing of instruments than the actual narrative, however, the performance in itself serves as somewhat of a narrative, whilst the actual narrative is generally very effective and powerful. The point of this is that songs of these genres don’t need extensive, or very much, narrative at all and that the music speaks for itself.