Entering discussions for our coursework music video, we considered alternative options for genre choice and decided on hip-hop. The initial song that we considered was The Next Episode by Dr.Dre and Snoop Dogg. The Next Episode was first released in 2001 in Dr.Dre’s album ‘2001’ as the third single in the album. This song featured a collaboration with fellow hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg. The single reached 23rd place on US Billboard, also reaching Platinum in the UK and Gold in Germany and Italy. At present day, the single is best know for its distinctive intro and beat, and it is often featured as the background music for memes as well as TikTok videos. The official music video for The Next Episode currently has 630 million views on YouTube.
The official music video features Snoop Dogg and Dr.Dre rapping on the second floor of a stripper club and frequently cuts between lip-syncing shots and shots of strippers dancing on the first floor. In terms of camera and editing techniques, slow-motion shots are frequently employed, with large amounts of fade in/outs used as transitions between rapping and dancing shots. The music video uses a vibrant red/green/purple colour gradient for shots in the first floor of the club, presumably to emulate the strong coloured lights used in club environments.
MV Ideas
Regarding our own music video, it would be unlikely for us to emulate the club scenes since none of our group members are familiar with nightclubs, and it would also be unsuitable for us to show explicit scenes to a young audience. We considered using a bar as an alternative, but upon inquiring friends who have been to pubs, we found out that most bars in Beijing prohibited filming with cameras. This creates some potential difficulties for us to reproduce some classic hip-hop genre tropes.
Nevertheless, our music video will be a performance music video. Traditionally, hip-hop genre music videos feature large amounts of shots depicting artists rapping in different environments. This is due to the lyric-heavy nature of hip-hop songs, and combining lip-syncing with bodily gestures delivers a emotionally evocative performance for audiences.
Idea Evaluation
Pros
The song has a suitable length and rhythm. At 2 minutes and 42 seconds, the song is concise and the slow groovy rhythm allows us to control the amount of shots required for the music video. This would make the filming process easier to plan and execute. As a producer
The song is popular and well-received. Hearing the melody should immediately create a strong emotional effect on the audience. Creating a strong sense of audience identification is greatly beneficial considering the promotional purpose of music videos. In particular, the hip-hop genre appeals specifically to a younger audience demographic, which suits our target audience of middle/high school students.
High availability of related resources. Traditionally, the hip-hop genre is traditionally associated with material wealth, manifested in items such as cars and watches. Fortunately, Bobby and Richard happen to own some cars that can be utilised for our shoots. This makes sourcing misc-en-scene elements much easier, and should make our music video product adhere strongly with the intended genre, creating a convincing effect.
Cons
Idea-wise, I came up with a large number of general ideas that fit well with the overarching themes of the traditional hip-hop genre, such as using coloured, low-key lighting and slow motion shots in bars and filming close ups of cars and watches etc., yet the strong immediate association with genre conventions created difficulties for me to come up with non-cliched, original ideas. The lyrics also dictates a clear direction the music video, but the amount of mature language/content is unsuitable for our intended audience.
Representation wise, hip-hop is traditionally associated with African-American artists. Due to this reason, the song contains a high amount of explicit language, which is not suitable for our target school-aged audience. In particular, some terms are considered to be highly offensive when spoken by non-African American ethnic groups, which makes the song particularly sensitive for our predominantly Asian cast. We could potentially censor the words from our music video, but it would lower the overall production quality and emotional impact of our project while also retaining the risk of offending certain social groups.
Conclusion
Due to the aforementioned reasons, I concluded that The Next Episode was not a particularly good choice for our music video. As the producer of our group, it was my responsibility to produce ideas and plan the specific content in our music video, and thus I convinced our group to reconsider our song options, further discussed in Blog Post 6.