EU - Representation and ideological discourse

The main stars of our video will my Jack, Ollie and Eddy. All white teenage youths so therefore we arent getting a range of genders, ages or races. we will however not be portraying youths in the way alot of the music industry does with example like jamie T and plan B whose typical "jack the lad" star motif makes the entire youth culture look threatening in some way. this is not helped by the film industry with films like kidulthood and shank putting them in a bad light. we have decided to cast ourselves as grown ups with eddy being a bussiness man and jack and ollie performing their music on a stage. also wearing respectable clothing rather than a tracksuit. when thinking of this idea about "hoodies" i thought of the music video hoodie by lady sovereign in which she mocks the idea of hoodies being threaning and something to be feared. the narrative in this music video is of two posh females being chased through a shopping mall by a large group of hooded youths. the two women expect the worst and run away when it really turned out to be the youths returning her handbag that she had left in a shop earlier on.

When looking at music videos race is not really an issue as it seems the visual is typically a cast filled with all the same ethnicity so therefore i dont think our video will be seen as racist in anyway in this overly politically correct world at the moment.

As part of this research i chose the music video Naive by the kooks because our songs and style are very similar. they are an all white male band of youths as are we so it will be interesting to see how they portrayed their ideologies and representation in the video.

Watching the music video it represented white male youths and one white female youth. the male youths were the ones that came out looking better from the music video. this may be because it was the band and they need to be represented well or because it is some residual ideology of men being better. Another thing i noticed about costume that could help us is the classic rebellion motif of a leather jacket. We know that youths are interested by the classic bad boy image but we want our performance to be civilized so therefore a leather jacket would be ideal for Jack or Ollie to wear.

The girl is represented as a girl who sleeps around and dosent look after herself. there is a part where she stumbles up to a man in a club and gets turned away by him, she then grabs another man and fornication is emplied when they go into the toilet together. an emerging idelogy that young girls are irresponsible with their bodies is prominant here.