How Genre Reflects Music Videos

In some cases, perhaps more often than not, certain genre characteristics can often restrict the creativity and flexibility of certain music video producers, directors and artists themselves. By limiting them to certain conventions that appear in music videos of a particular genre, for example, a common representation of a music video of perhaps a heavy rock or metal band would display them on stage performing to an audience, or if a boy/girl band have produced a music video, it will more than like contain some sort of dance routine. As Hartley (1994) argues 'genres are agents of ideological closures - they limit the potential meaning of a text'. An example of a music video that depicts this would be Aerosmith VS Run DMC 'Walk This Way' which displays the band performing to a live audience.



Not only does Hartley say this about music videos, but so do Hodge & Kress (1988) who state that 'control of behaviour of producers of such texts, the expectations of potential consumers'. This suggests that the more consumers see of a certain genre and its conventions, they will, in time, get bored of seeing the same thing and find the concepts very repetitive. An example of music videos being similar is Green Day - American Idiot, which shares a similar theme to the music video above, in that it shows all the band performing live, the only difference being that in the Green Day song, the performance is not in front of a live audience.