Sunday, 27 June 2010

Textaul Analysis of Music Video- Unfaithful by Rihanna



Unfaithful was from the album 'A Girl Like Me', which was Rihanna's second album. It was written by Ne-Yo, Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel S.Erikson. The label that owned it was Def Jam, which is a subsidiary of Universal Music Group which is one of the big 4. This means that they usually do mainstream music for a bigger audience, therefore Rihanna is targeting her song to a mainstream audience. Her song is a a pop/R&B Ballad which makes it different to her other songs but this song has a popular narrative to it. It is about a girl (Rihanna) cheating on her boyfriend, this is quite a popular story that happen in life so a lot of the audience will be able to relate to the story and therefore will like the song.
The typical conventions would be that she is dressed like a typical R&B singer in some of the scenes for example there is a shot of her wearing jeans, a jacket and sun glasses. She is also wearing a lot of jewellery especially big earings.
The music video is a performance as Rihanna is playing the role of the cheating girlfriend. At the beginning of the song we have heart-beating noises and a slow tune which makes the video really enteresting and makes the audience concentrate on the story line. It shows how Rihanna as the girl who cheats is feeling when they are in acafe and the guy she is cheating with sends her a message on a piece of paper when her boyfirend wasn't there. She is feeling scared and looks around to check the boyfriend isn't there.
From the mise-en-scene we can see that the video is shot in a theatre where everything is untidy and there is graffiti all over the walls, this relates to how she is feeling, nothing seems nice to her, she is tense and uneasy and she can't enjoy anything knowing that her boyfriend is heartborken as he knows she is cheating on him.
After the scene where we get introduced to the story, the song starts. We get a sequence of shots of Rihanna and her boyfriend that she is cheating on, from the shots they both seem happy, it shows how much he loves her, so knowing that there is someone in between their relationship will be very heartbreaking for the boyfriend.
When she starts singing, she is walking and fidgeting with her fingers, everyone gets fidgety when there is something bothering them, when they are worried and don't know what to do. Similarly towards the end of the song she is leaning against a white wall and again she keeps moving, she seems to want to break out and cry becuase she doesn't want her boyfriend to suffer.

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