Band: Cage and the Elephant Song: “Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked” Released: 2008 Total Shots: 147 Separate Shots

Cage and the Elephant is a indie rock band who are known for creating very unique songs that often explore strange and normally untouched themes. The specific song I went for this time was their song “Ain’t no Rest for the Wicked”. The song itself is about how the hardship of life can make people actions that may be deemed socially unacceptable hence the popular saying “no rest for the wicked”. Moving onto the video itself it has a very disjointed appearance and editing style. The entire video has a old film reel filter placed on top of it and we often see the sides of the film on the video or even the film itself burring up. Using this filter makes the video seem dirtier and disjointed as if somebody had hastily cut the film together and it creates this almost dizzying sense, as we feel confused just as the main singer looks like in the video. The video itself does fall to some of the genre and general music video conventions. During the chorus when the tempo of the song speeds up we suddenly see a massive increase in the amount of cuts and edits used. This amplifies the message of the music and creates a harmony between the two mediums as when the temp increases so does the edits. It gives the video a great sense of pace and makes the audience feel like they are going on some form of journey with the narrative of the video. Throughout the video we also see many close up and medium close up shots of just the lead singer of the band walking along a road. This is probably some input from the record label, as they would prefer to create a brand around the lead singer who is obviously the main aspect of any band hence the alternative name “The Frontman”. That said there are plenty of quick cuts to the other band members playing their respective instruments, which in itself is a genre convention of the rock/indie genre as they often show the artists playing their instruments on screen along with the audio. This again gets the band’s image out there and helps the audience to identify them, which then makes it easier to sell the bands content and merchandise. Linking back to this idea of narrative mentioned earlier. Here we have a non-chronological story told during the course of the song. We start out with the band members in what appears to be a crashed car. We then flashback to when they were driving around and getting into trouble. We see various cut-always to

women dressed in “nightlife” clothing and this again lends itself to voyeuristic tendencies. The rock/indie genre is very popular with the male audience so it isn’t out of the ordinary to see women barely clothed or in sexy poses as this is a form of pandering to that particular focus group. Back to the narrative; the editing style itself is very elliptical and it often jumps from one situation to another and then back to the previous scene and this again creates a sense of the narrative being some from of rush and a lot happens within a short time. It also creates a very detached vibe as it feels like the band are staggering from want situation to another almost like a drunken night out which again is a convention of the rock genre. So for an indie band they do play a lot towards the general tropes of the rock genre band but they also do it in a strange and unique manner. We rarely see music videos with such high levels of complex editing and narratives told in such a dis-jointed manner. That itself though is very much an indie trope as those types of bands tend to be a lot more unique compared to others.