Representation of Women in the Music Industry

I created this document as part of my coursework, where I was required to look into an aspect of the music industry.

A Fear of Young People

Tanya Byron's article, 'We see children as pestilent', speaks predominantly about the constant disdain felt through history towards young people. She mentions three striking examples that sound very similar to the things often written and spoken in regards to young people, using words that mention a lack of respect, rudeness, impatience, decaying society, riots, immodest and selfish. These span as far back as Ancient Egyptian periods, with mentions of 4th Century Plato and AD 1274 priest Peter the Hermit.

Byron believes this has culminated in a "historically nurtured and culturally damaging phenomenon", ephebiphobia, or the fear of youth. She believes the issue is worse today than ever before.
Byron states that young people are "feared because of the actions of a minority population - the violent, aggressive and antisocial", which is a population that has always been in existence throughout all manner of age and social groups.

This mistreatment and unjust stereotyping of young people has created a self fulfilling prophecy whereby the labels given to young people are internalised and become part of their self concept. After all, "why both to try when you are told you are a failure? Why bother to strive when your existence is seen as a nuisance?"

This already vulnerable group of people is targeted further, Byron claims, by the education system and its culture of targets and testing, "staffed by creatively compromised and disempowered teachers". They are often blocked from striving to achieve higher goals by "elitist and narrowly defined notions of academic competence" found in higher education systems preventing many young people from even trying to access these institutions for fear of denial and mockery.

Byron states that children are first labelled in nurseries and schools, and therefore these labels often stick as they are generally very condemning and tend to encompass a persons identity in the eyes of colleagues and parents. If a child is labelled as a troublemaker during their first year, they will most likely be treated as such, with subsequent teachers expecting them to misbehave. They may even automatically place them in lower streams and set them lower grades to fit in with this label.
As Byron states in her article, many children "develop behaviours to compensate" for the difficulties they encounter in school and often get labelled as a class clown "or worse".

She claims that "children labelled as failures in primary and secondary education have no hope of further or higher education", most likely due to resources, time, and expectations being allocated elsewhere in cases where young pupils are labelled as no-hopers. The younger age at which a child is labelled, negatively or positively, tends to have an extremely large impact on their future achievements.
Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted an experiment in an American school, testing children with an IQ test. Teachers were lead to believe that certain students were entering a year of high achievement (20% of the sample was selected at random and labelled as 'blooming') and other students were not. In reality, the test had no predictive validity.
The same test was used at the end of the school year, only this time the results were not toyed with. Differences in IQ for the children who had been targeted as 'blooming' could then be examined.
The results demonstrated expectancy effects, with the labelled children showing greater gains in IQ than those who had not been. This only occurred within the youngest age groups; reflecting the importance of a child being given support, help and most importantly, not being judged at such a young age.

Light Up The Background - Rough Edit

This link will take you to my rough edit of the music video I have been creating for The LaFontaines' song, Light Up The Background.

The video is only rough in the sense that it is still missing clips. The content already present in the video is more or less finished and what I will be using in the finished version.

Posthumanism

Human Traffic

1. Human Traffic can be considered a social realist film as it tackles some of the issues faced by society today in a way that is not entirely glorifying it. Social realism is defined as: the realistic depiction in art of contemporary life, as a means of social or political comment. There is definitely a social comment made in Human Traffic, in the form of it being a social commentary on youth culture and their habits surrounding drugs.

The characters in it have fairly depressing situations although they are told in through black comedy; for instance there is a scene in which Jip is being sexually assaulted (in a dream like scenario) by his male boss, as a metaphor for how his job is exploiting him, and his mother, who he has only just come back into contact with, is a prostitute. His friend, Koop, has a father who is suffering from mental health issues after his wife left him, and Koop is having to deal with the fallout and having a father who does not remember him, as well as being a victim to the constant paranoia caused by his casual weekend drug taking. Koop’s girlfriend, Nina, works in a fast food restaurant and she is a victim of actual everyday sexual harassment from a lecherous boss and finds the monotony of her job too much to bear. Nina’s friend, Lulu, is fiercely trying to get through college, and the group’s friend Moff is trying to get by as a small time drug dealer whilst trying to get along with his straight-laced, nuclear family, headed by parents who see drugs and youth culture as incredibly black and white issues.

The main issues explored in Human Traffic include alienation, relationships and drugs. We can see these issues explored in other social realism pieces, such as The Selfish Giant, This Is England and Quadrophenia.

2. The youth culture depicted in this film seems to be resisting mainstream society. For instance, they all seem unhappy with going along with their 9 to 5 jobs, and showing Nina quit emphasises how she is not going to just put up with it like mainstream society. They also all take drugs at the weekend, meaning that they represent a small proportion of the population. The character of Moff resists the mainstream society in that he is a drug dealer, selling drugs to get by, rather than getting a regular job like everyone else. The relationship he has with his parents is also not one that would be considered mainstream – instead of getting along with them, he is laughed at by his mother and looked down upon by his father.
We see a good example of how the girls in the film resist mainstream society by being sarcastic and demeaning when they are being interviewed in the club. They give the answers that they think the interviewer is looking to hear (that they take heroin etc, showing that soft drugs lead to harder drugs) but they are actually doing it as a form of resistance, as they feel the exact opposite.

3. The values present in this film include gratification, although it is hard to tell whether it is delayed or immediate. It is delayed in the sense that they work hard during the week to ensure they can have a good weekend, but of course it is immediate in the sense that they are not working towards something larger, such as a house or car.

They are hedonistic and they are shown to leave jobs easily. In this sense, they are seen to have little concern for money, especially considering the amount they are implied to spend on a Friday night. They feel victimised by the media and by wider society, as shown in the scene where they sing the new ‘National Anthem’ and they are disdainful towards older people, who are shown to not understand them.

 4.The film is British in the sense that it involves a British subculture, and British slang. It features a lot of British music and it is directed by a British director.

The fact there was an American version of the film, which was re-dubbed, suggests the film is very British, and that some of the references made are too British for wider society to understand.

5. I decided to analyse the scene where Koop and Jip are talking, bent over a glass table and preparing some drugs for them to take. This shot was particularly striking in my opinion because it felt so voyeuristic. The camera seems to be positioned under the table, so we can see in detail the preparation of the drugs as well as the faces of both Jip and Koop. The shot is continuous and we do not see any cuts. The shot is long and uninterrupted, which suggests that there is calm at that moment, which is juxtaposed with the scene before where Moff and another partygoer are very much still in the party atmosphere.

We see Koop lining up the drugs, and this is interesting because he is doing it in an absent-minded manner as he chats to Jip about his worries over his father. Koop claims to be worried because ‘those drugs they’re giving him…f***ing his head up mate’. This is ironic as the drugs that Koop is shown to be taking throughout the evening, as well as the ones he is about to take, have all lead to the immense paranoia he feels over his relationship with girlfriend Nina, as he believes that she is going to sleep with other men behind his back. This is constantly brought up throughout the film and it can be said that the illegal drugs Koop is taking are having a similar effect on him as the prescribed ones are on his dad.

Similarly, when the scene opens we see Koop asking Jip what he was talking about, as Koop appears to have lost his train of thought. It takes a few moments for either of the men to establish what they had been talking about. This parallels the fact that Koop’s dad thinks that Koop is two twins pretending to be the same person – called Neil.

This is also interesting in the sense that this is an interesting look into drug culture on a far wider scale – not just in young people. Koop’s dad is on prescribed drugs but they appear to be having just as much of a negative effect, if not worse, than the illegal ones that his son and his son’s group of friends engage in every weekend.

London Riots

BBC News Coverage shows "youths gathering around" a police car. It was just being used to block off a road and "suddenly" became the target for "this violence" - and apparently shows how "the mood of the crowd can change in a moment". We then see Andy Moore being forced out of the area and it sounds as though he has been pushed to the ground. The youths tell the reporter that he is 'too late' - perhaps showing that the young people would have liked to have been able to share their opinions and have their say before the events.

The positioning of camera in this video shows the young person to be completely alien compared to the interviewer - face covered, head covered, whereas the interviewer looks much more open and innocent in comparison.
Underneath the image, we can see the latest 'breaking news', with 1,051 people charged so far in relation to the riots.
However this is not a live report and therefore it could have easily been constructed and mediated to give off a certain message.

Darcus Howe is a writer and broadcaster that some BBC News reporters spoke to live from the scenes of one of the areas where rioting took place. He speaks passionately about the issues. He claims to have been sure that 'something was going to take place. Our political leaders had no idea. The police has no idea. But if you looked at young blacks and young whites with a discerning eye, and a careful hearing, they have been telling us and we would not listen'. He later goes on to state that Duggan had his face 'blown off', to which the reporter chastises him for making assumptions. The name of this video is London Riots (The BBC will never replay this. Send It Out), and it has over 5.5 million views on Youtube. This is another live piece. However, what is interesting is that in the three clips I have looked at, the youths have not been given a fair voice of their own. In the first, no one is interviewed and young people are made to seem brutish as the middle-class, middle-aged reporter and his camera crew are forced out of the area mainly filled with working-class young people. In the second, young people are able to talk - but the story is pre-recorded and therefore it gives Sky News the chance to mediate the clip by taking out anything that makes the men seem in anyway positive, or give their actions any real justification.
The third is a man, who was 68 years old at the time, giving his opinions. Although his opinions seem to give more reason to what the young people are doing, he is not a fair representation of the rioters because he is not a rioter.

An article from the Daily Mail shows a lot of disdain and ephebiphobia from upper-middle class, middle-aged professionals. They use a menagerie of emotive and sensationalist phrases, such as 'disgruntled youths' and 'lamentable spectacle'. One sentence in particular shows the real feelings aimed at young people - 'let's not pretend our street thugs would be doing their homework rather than on the rampage if the money had been spent on maths books' - lumping young people together as 'street thugs'. This is done through implying the 'thugs' are supposed to be doing homework. The article appears to justify itself by commenting on how other countries are feeling - looking on with 'trepidation, astonishment and... a sneer'. This article comments on 'riot-torn streets of the capital' and claims that footballer Rio Ferdinand believes the Army will be best at controlling the aforementioned 'thugs'.
They also point blame at the welfare state in one article. They list four bullet points beneath the title of the article:

• 100 suspects on disability living allowance, 60 on incapacity benefits
• 40% were on benefits on some kind
• Fewer than one in 10 rioters was in a gang
• 53% of suspects were under 21

In these bullet points, the Daily Mail succeeds in vilifying multiple groups of people. They point the blame at gang culture, point the blame at young people, point the blame at benefit claimants and those who live on disability living allowance. Oddly enough, the man writing the article does not fit into a single one of these categories. Embedded in the article are links to further stories - one of which claims that 1 in 7 of the rioters was foreign; again, pointing the blame at another social group.

They call the police 'helpless' in the face of a fire - despite the fact that it is not the job of the police to be controlling a fire in the first place.

They also demonstrate some offensive attitudes towards disabled people - they feature a CCTV image of a man stealing a TV whilst being in a wheelchair, seeming to suggest that people in wheelchairs are incapable of committing crime. 

This can be seen as helping to validate the opinions of the people who read the paper, and helps them to lay blame on a certain group of people - rather than being in a mass state of confusion over why it happened.

In contrast, articles from The Guardian seem a little less enraged and a little less emotionally charged. This article, by Nina Power, seems to be a little more sympathetic towards the root causes of the riots rather than simply trying to point the blame in hindsight.

In conclusion, it seems that there was not really a very fair representation of young people in the news during the riots. The most easy to access news stories about the riots were either heavily mediated or include people who do not fit into the social groups of the people who were taking part in the riots.

Some of the stories are incredibly subjective, especially in newspapers, where it is easy to use emotive language. The absence of moving image seems to encourage journalists to use uncommon, rich and powerful words. 

Audience Profiling (Revisited) - The LaFontaines

Music Video Inspiration - Mikill Pane

I got an idea for a shot in my music video from Mikill Pane's music video, Blame Miss Barclay, at 2:03 to 2:07.

This shot shows someone holding their smartphone and clicking play on a video on the London Riots, which is called 'London Riots 2011 [ Our Crime ]'.
I think that this will be good in my video. I want to show the spread of information through social media, and using a video either the same as this or of the Mr Freeman video used in the beginning will be good.
This is also a close up shot which I think will fit in nicely with my music video, as I want to have a lot of these, as can be seen in my storyboard (1, 2), shot list and treatment.

Music Video Treatment

I put together a music video treatment to help utilise my ideas about style, look and provide a basic outline of plot.

Audience Profiling - Revisited

I have decided to revisit my audience-profiling task, in order to examine a more relevant artist to the one I decided to profile, which was Jessie J. Although I found a lot of things out about Jessie J and her fan base, she is not linked closely enough to The Lafontaines for any of this research to be helpful.

For this reason, I have decided to profile The Lafontaines.

Assumptions:

Gender: I don’t feel that there would be a noticeable difference in gender. Although the band is male, this would not dissuade women from listening to them. Their songs seem to address issues that face most people or irritate a larger proportion of people. Their song, Shark In The Water, addresses the issue of women being overly promiscuous for attention – but not in a misogynistic way, as the lyrics also pay attention to the fact that some women feel intimidated and overpowered by their female friends. Similarly, the song is from a male perspective, attracting male listeners.

Age: I would put the age of fans for The Lafontaines as anywhere between 14 and 30, but probably falling mainly between the ages of 18 and 24. This group is likely to be able to access gigs and festivals much more easily due to the lesser financial pressures put on them at this age than when they have a house and a family, and equally any younger than 18 may mean that they cannot access the gigs or have enough money to travel to see them.

Fashion: I feel that the fans of The Lafontaines most likely wear average clothes, much like the band members, who can be seen wearing t-shirts, jeans and shirts. They also have been known to wear suits at some of their gigs, such as when they performed their show ‘Club Fontaine’ in early April 2013 wearing full Morning Suits complete with bow ties.

            The lead vocalist, Kerr Okan, has a fairly sophisticated hairstyle, which is slicked back on top and shorter around the back and sides. However, this is not to say that all fans would replicate this; Jamie Keenan, the drummer and occasional vocalist, has a much more laid back style, with relatively long, wavy hair that is much more ‘scruffy’ than Okan’s.

Social Practices: For a less well-known band like The Lafontaines, it is important to have good social networking set up. They have a Facebook page, which helps them to reach fans, as well as a Twitter. They have a page on Bandcamp, as well as a Tumblr page, which doubles as their website, and a Myspace page (although this looks fairly abandoned). They also have a YouTube channel. 

As a result, I think fans will be fairly technologically literate and be able to follow the band on these various platforms. This helps them to spread their music too, as fans might share around links to songs they enjoy. Facebook has a feature which shares a story, such as a person liking a page, so people who do not know of the band might see something saying “John Jones has liked The Lafontaines” and then click on the link to check out what John Jones is interested in.

I think that fans of this band might also listen to radio stations such as BBC Radio 1, which plays a more varied range of music than Kiss or Capital FM, and has played the band before on late night shows. The Lafontaines also performed on the BBC Introducing stage at T in the Park in 2013.

Interests: I would assume that fans of this band would most likely be interested in fairly standard activities, such as meeting friends and socialising. I would also assume that they enjoy going to gigs, since the band still attracts a lot of fans through gigging in small venues around the Glasgow area from where they originated.

Fans might also enjoy listening to similar music and doing activities seen in the bands videos, such as going to festivals. I think they might enjoy listening to music of the genres which The Lafontaines’ draw influences from, such as from rock, hip-hop and pop genres.

Below this point is the raw text I used to create this post.