Bruno Mars– “The Lazy Song”

The video for the Bruno Mars song “The Lazy Song” is 3 minutes 29 seconds long. It begins with Bruno Mars looking into the camera before him then moving backwards and sitting in the middle of 5 people, all with prosthetic monkey heads on. This establishing shot is powerful and immediately draws the viewers’ attention to the video, and in this sense it performs its role well as a pop video.

The opening 30 seconds highlights that this is a performance music video and the choreography is the strongest characteristic of the video – the first of these points is reflected in the book “Music Videos and the Politics of Representation” by Diane Railton and Paul Watson and the latter in Andrew Goodwin’s book “Dancing in the Distraction Factory”. The location of the video is very uninspiring and normal, along with the clothing of the people in the video and the simple lighting; these help to keep the focus on the choreography and prosthetics and gives it the feeling that it is a home video and less of a professional production. The home video feel is likely to appeal to the target audience and the comedic nature of the video may encourage fans to share it on Facebook or like it in Youtube, hence helping to make it a viral hit.

This video is rather unique within recent music videos in the fact that it is one continuous recording with no cuts or transitions (one shot), which would have undoubtedly taken a large amount of time to rehearse and record – this could suggest to the audience that the artist takes their music seriously and wants to create a video which is different from the videos made by their competitors. Nevertheless the videos made by OkGo were one-shot videos and they also became massive viral hits and inspiration from them may have been behind some of the thinking for this video.

This corresponds successfully with the notion that music videos are created to promote the artist and song and hence a unique video is likely to garner greater media coverage and receive critical acclaim; it also complies with Andrew Goodwin’s idea that the record companies want the focus of music video s to be on the artist – for example in this video Bruno Mars is almost always in the middle of the shot and the choreography focuses around him. There is likely to have been little editing of the video due to the nature of it being a one shot, with possibly touches up to colour and contrast being the only minor changes.

Humour is prominent in the video, such as at 1:38, and this relates well to the feel of the music and the lyrics – another point made by Andrew Goodwin. The use of monkeys also goes well with the idea of “lazy” as monkeys are often seen as being stereotypically lazy. Philip Lawrence makes an appearance in this video which is an inter-textual reference and the inclusion of special guests could be viewed as a “treat” to the fans of the artist and as something to notice when watching the video.

The choreography vaguely follows the lyrics of the song which also goes along with another idea by Andrew Goodwin that there will be a connection between the video and the lyrics of the song; however there is also a contrast because the choreography is planned and, as stated before, is likely to have taken a long time to rehearse and record is there at odds with the notion of being “lazy”. It can be stated therefore that this video is also a Staged Performance, which was one of the main four music videos specified by Diane Railton and Paul Watson in the book “Music Videos and the Politics of Representation”.

Joe Gow stated in his book “Music Video as Communication: Popular Formulas and Emerging Genres” that there are 6 types of music videos and two of these apply to this video; “the song and dance number” (as seen throughout, notably at 1:00) and the “pseudo-performance video” (as seen in the first 5 seconds of the video), whereby there is choreographed dancing and lip-synching but also at the very start of the video the process of creating the video is shown, for example by Bruno Mars turning the camera on and adjusting the tilt of the camera.

It is also possible to apply the idea suggested by Steve Jones in his book “Cohesive but not Coherant; Music Videos, Narrative and Culture” that this video is a mimetic narrative and a concert performance of this song is likely to have elements of this video in it, especially seeing as it has obtained over 200 million views on YouTube as of September 2011.