David Bowie Ashes to Ashes
Genre and Characteristics
The genre of this single is classed as 'New Wave', this is a sub-genre of rock music which in the mid 1970's alongside punk rock. This incorporated aspects of electronic and experimental music, mod subculture, disco and 1960's pop music. This is shown really well in this video as Mallet uses colours to express the weirdness of the music and the genre. It almost looks as if it is a negative colour but the colours are so bold but yet static you some times think that your screen has mucked up. The clown costume also shows the modernistic value of the music and 'new wave' of music that is coming about. By choosing out going costumes and colours that do not belong he has created a new type of video that has never been done it such a way before but it has also put a new look on the new wave genre that was coming about. Almost as if he put the image to the genre.
Lyrics and Visuals
Within the video the lyrics follow 'The shrieking of nothing is killing me' When this is sung we see David Bowie sat in a padded room all on his own with nothing but a chair to sit on, this to me shows the nothing that he sings of as there is nothing with him and the room is completely empty and silent.
Further on in the song we hear the lyrics, 'Hitting an all-time-low'. When we hear this we see that the two people at the end of the line are both at each time leaning down and touching the floor to shoe imagery of hitting and all-time-low.
Then the lyrics follow, 'I'll stay clean tonight'. The presumption we get from this is that he won't take any drugs and this is emphasized when we see him sitting in the corner of the padded room once again rocking from and to like an addict would if they were being starved from there habit. With these lyrics, actions and surrounding it gives us the assumption that he is going crazy and needs his addiction back.
Music and visuals
The music starts off very funky and we see that the colours on the video are also very funky and you cannot quite make out what you are seeing, as if it is distorted with colour, as the music is also hard to figure out as you first begin to listen to it as it doesn't sound like anything you have heard before.
In the first verse we hear Bowie singing but then his singing goes a little deeper as he finishes the verse but with this he stop lip singing and their is a freeze frame whilst another image comes up on a piece of card he is holding up, this created a type of suspense which makes us wonder why his voice has gone deeper and what the next image will be.
Just as the chorus arrives we hear a line sung with a chorus of people and at that point four characters dressed in strange outfits outline the frame and lip sing to the line, this is a visual to the music as it induces a sense of being watched as they are never direct with Bowie but only always seem to pop up every now and again when their line comes into focus.
Demands of the Record Label
This was done with RCA Records which is one of the flagship labels of Sony Entertainment. This certain RCA label deals with pop music, rock music and country music. Knowing this we can assume that they would want the video to be as pop like and rock like as possible. They may have asked that there was some kind of modernistic look towards the video as they have been running since 1901 and they want to keep up with the times and possibly put images of certain new genres forward. Not only that but because they were a flagship for Sony Entertainment this meant that they would have to keep up with the times and they would have had a good amount of money to spend on the video as it was produced by a big record label.
Intertextual Reference
When he is sitting in the chair as the scene is black and white it seems as if he is making a reference to a science fiction film especially as it is in black and white, to show the madness in the song perhaps.
No comments:
Post a Comment