History of Music Videos

 The four music I have to chosen to compare are;

"Walk This Way"-Aerosmith  1980
"Smell Like Teen Spirit"-Nirvana 1990
"Californication"-Red Hot Chili Peppers 2000's
"Maps"-Maroon 5  2014

"Walk This way" by Aerosmith has a very strong performance based music video. This was probably because of its rock genre, which focuses on the atmosphere of concerts and how the fans react to seeing them. This music video had only a little bit of narrative at the start which develops into the performance shots which take up the majority of the video. Next is "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana, which despite being ten years later, has a very similar music video in which the music video is made up of just performance shots. However "Californication" by Red Hot Chili Peppers is a huge difference in video content. For example the only performance shots we see are in the top left corner of the screen which is hardly noticeable compared the video game themed narrative which the the main focus of the video. It features the members of the band as characters within the CGI world taking traditional music videos to a whole new level. Lastly "Maps" by Maroon 5 has the strongest narrative based video, featuring zero performance shots. The narrative shots show the lead singer in a narrative based world as a regular man, not as a performer e.g Aerosmith's StevenTyler. This shows that over thirty years music videos have changed quite dramatically over the years from pure perfromance, performance, with little narrative, narrative with little performance and finally pure narrative based music videos