-

HOLIDAYI am going to analyse the music video for Green Day’s song Holiday, as it represents the genre I would like to look into quite well.

The music video features strong visuals with many interesting technical aspects to discuss.

The video opens with this animated shot which is in the style of the album artwork that the song features on. It reminds the audience that the band has strong political views that could be represented in the song

This could apply to Stuart Hall’s Reception theory, wherein the producer of the media (director Samuel Bayer) has followed the meaning of the song and included messages about war and government corruption in the video.

There are many of these types of shots throughout the video, of the band jumping around in a car in front of a green screen. This could show that the band still wants to be seen as a fun band to listen to, not deadly serious despite the topics talked about in the song’s lyrics. You could apply Andrew Goodwin’s theory of relation of visuals to audio and talk about disjuncture or illustration. Disjuncture means that the meaning of the song is completely ignored, and the visuals do their own thing (this could relate to the types of shots shown above), whereas some shots illustrate what the band singing about (for example the shot on the previous slide.

The video moves on to the band in a bar playing several different characters; Armstrong plays a nerd, a punk, and two rich men, Dirnt plays a barman and a police officer, Cool plays a vomiting priest, an alcoholic and a prostitute. Since the band are no longer performing, this section could be considered narrative, which again relates to Andrew Goodwin, this time his theory of performance and narrative. The two are fairly self-explanatory; performance features someone performing the song, narrative means a story taking place to the song. You could also talk of the technical aspects of the shots, the multiple layers merging together to have the band be several characters at once.

This is an interesting shot, because of the composition of it. The layout of the dancers, the car, and Armstrong in the front-centre gives the shot an element of symmetry, but because of the movement and offset of all these elements, the symmetry becomes asymmetrical. This provides a jilted nature to the shot, perhaps reflecting the meaning behind the song.

There are various close-ups during this part, and look generally like this. Because the song takes a more sinister twist, Armstrong’s eyes have been shadowed from the camera so you can’t see them. This could link back to Goodwin’s theory of illustration, the shadowed eyes referring to nameless corrupt politicians.