Conventions of Acoustic Rock

Jayne Summers & Daisy Edwards

Typical Locations

As in typical music videos, studio shots are mainly used to save money, however, if a song has a particular message of theme, acoustic rock videos will sometimes take place outside, for example James Morrison’s video for ‘Please Don’t Stop The Rain’ which is filmed outdoors.

Typical Characters

In Acoustic Rock videos the main protagonist is usually the artist, it’s very unlikely that other actors or backing singers/dancers will appear in the video.

Typical Iconography

The iconography is mainly reflected by the band or artists image as they bring their own style and personality to the their music.

With Acoustic Rock, it only makes sense that the iconography should therefore represent the genre and the artist, for example there will very rarely see an acoustic rock artist in a bright pink frilly dress.

Typical Narrative

This purely depends on whether the song has a narrative in itself; usually most videos are performance based. Those that do contain a narrative may be very simple and not shown as frequently throughout the video.

A singer that breaks this convention within the genre is Kate Nash, whose songs are usually narrative based, which plays out in the video itself.

Typical Media Language

Media Language in acoustic rock is almost identical to any music video: use of close ups, editing to match pace etc.

The one convention that does stand out if the male gaze, which is hardly ever used in acoustic rock videos because the focus is purely on the music/artist and not there looks, whereas other genres such as hiphop have the male gaze in almost every video.

Typical Ideology

Since most acoustic rock videos are performance based, they do not usually feature obvious ideologies, dominant or alternate.