Genre Theory

The Strengths Of Genre Theory

•The main strength of genre theory is that everybody uses it and understands it – media experts use it to study media texts, the media industry uses it to develop and market texts and audiences use it to decide what texts to consume.

•The potential for the same concept to be understood by producers, audiences and scholars makes genre a useful critical tool. Its accessibility as a concept also means that it can  be applied across a wide range of texts.

Music video –medium with many sub-genres / postmodern styles?

Music video is a medium intended to appeal directly to youth subcultures by reinforcing generic elements of musical genres.

•They are called pop-promos as they are used to promote a band or artist.

•Music videos are postmodern texts whose main purpose is to promote a star persona (Dyer, 1975).

•They don’t have to be literal representations of the song or lyrics.

In terms of genre, there are narrative and performance and some that combine both.

Both performance and narrative based videos are very often purely intertextual

•Blink 182 ‘All the Small Things’

•Weezer ‘Buddy Holly’.

They often pastiche/parody films or offer commentary on social events. Green Day’s Basket Case (1996) 

pastiches One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

Others include themes which may fit around the lyrics of the song or society (particularly if the band are well known activists known for supporting a cause).

• This is a medium known for being experimental and controversial (see conventions).

• The generic conventions stay the same but the style (the look of something) changes between music genres.

Genre Themes

David Bordwell (1989)

'any theme may appear in any genre‘.

Horror films, for example, are basically just modern fairy tales and often act as morality plays in which people who break society’s rules are punished.

Fear of the unknown – the monster is the ‘monstrous other’ i.e. anything that is scary because it is foreign or different.

Sex = death – in horror movies, especially Slasher movies, sex is immoral and must be punished, werewolf movies can be seen as a metaphor for puberty, vampires can be as metaphors for sexually transmitted diseases or rape etc.

The breakdown of society – post-apocalyptic movies are about our fear (or secret desire for) of the breakdown of society. The collapse of civilisation results in human kind reverting to their animal instincts.

Some music videos have themes for a more

youthful audience such as:

•Teen angst

•Rebellion - Conformity verses non-conformity;

•Romance;

•Sex/losing your virginity

•Nostalgia – for the innocence of youth

•Nihilism – the belief that there is no future;

•Coming of age rituals (e.g. the prom, falling in love, losing your virginity etc.);

•Tribalism: Popularity verses unpopularity, e.g.cliques;

•Bullying

Juvenile Delinquency: Moral panics and the teenager as a folk devil;

The currency of ‘cool’;

Hedonism – living purely for pleasure;

Friendship.

Other themes in music videos:

War

Crime

Poverty

Capitalism

Racism

Genres are not fixed. They constantly change and evolve over time – your coursework articles, as we have discussed, are postmodern pieces.