1b

I will be analyzing my A2 music promotion package, focusing on the music video for Atomic Kitten's "It's OK". A 3-piece UK girlband big around 2000, the track has a failed romance as the lyrical theme and this is reflected in a video combining two of Firth's three types of music video content: narrative (black and white footage of a young couple who are seen to fall out) and performance (using studio and forest locations and multiple costume changes). My aim was to reposition or re-brand the band for a youth audience, their original tween and teen core audience now being 20/30-somethings, so, following the basic premise of the uses and gratifications theory, I cast late-teens as my cast and performers, enabling teens to identify with and tweens to aspire to be like the cast. As Simon Reynolds argues in 'Retromania', nostalgia plays a large part in music appeal, so by keping the Atomic Kittens as youthful I hoped to appeal through nostalgia to the original fanbase too.

To paraphrase Richard Dyer, well known for his theory on star appeal, stereotypes are a way of reinforcing differences and representing these differences as natural. They can be difficult to avoid - as Lippmann argued, they are useful shorthand. For a mainstream text like mine this is useful, and clear gender stereotypes are present. Both the girlband and girlfriend character have long hair, a stereotypical signifier of femininity, with the boyfriend forming a standard binary opposition (Levi-Strauss) with his short hair. All four females are quite heavily made up with thick glossy lipstick, eyeliner and more. All five, girlband and couple, wear skin-tight jeans at some point, one of several aspects of mise-en-scene through their costume that would identify them as part of Maffessoli described as the 'urban tribe', an international youth that share common characteristics and reflect the increasingly globalised culture we live in. Specific British signifiers were avoided to help enhance international appeal.