Watching White Men Can't Jump

A black man would rather look bad and lose

I was recently watching a film named 'White Men Can't Jump' and despite it's obvious aim to break stereotypes it also enlightened me with a few too, Woody Harrelson who plays Billy Hoyle an white basketball hustler says a line in his script that got me thinking....'a black man would rather look good and lose than look bad and win'. This may have been a racial critique of black men but looking at the music industry and throughout history there has been a few events that have backed up his 'crazy' statement. 






Lets look at famous rappers

Asher Roth- "But money doesn't mean
a damn thing to me, i just want to be,
i want to be free"

Asher Roth just looking at the photograph on the right, one can already tell his image isn't like other rappers in fact i'm sure just looking at him you thought 'he looks strange for a rapper' this judgement brings me to my point. Is because he's white that people don't think he's rapper? No because they are amazingly talented rappers like Eminem but i'm sure it's because his look is so casual, his cream hoodie and standard jeans makes him look like any other person. We can say that it is just Asher who sticks to this humble 'apperance' but it pains me to say it most famous non-black rappers prefer to either look responsible or causal, without durags, diamond chains or showing cars without spinning rims. Just looking at what Eminem wore in the majority of his earlier videos is further evidence than he would rather be an amazing artist than look good for the camera/video.  

Simple white T-shirt and dyed blond hair
he carried this simple image throughout
the years 

After all these years, he's still
kept it simple

Even in genres

Ellie's costume for Under The Sheets

Rihanna's costume for
'What's My Name '

Looking at modern genres where the majority of musicians involved in the genre are black, are heavily filled with artist who must acquire a certain image as they grow in their fame, so this isn't all assumption lets look at the RnB and Indie industry.  Ladies first, Rihanna and Ellie Goulding both are iconic people in their different genres,  Rihanna in the RnB/Pop genre and Ellie Goulding in the Indie/Pop genre i have  taken screen-shots from videos of both them in their music videos for songs that were sex-related to make the comparison fair as possible. Looking at both pictures already you can see Rihanna is displaying much more of her body than Ellie is and her less-covering clothes are more wild and racy than Ellie's. As you can see Rihanna's image is very important to her whereas Ellie seems to not go for the most stylish video costumes. Even though these are just two artists from the two genres (Indie and RnB) but this is practically the same for many artists of the different industries, so is Woody's statement a blown out of proportion judgement? Or does his statement contain a deep truth of things black people do in the music industry?


What's this got to with me and the music video.....?
Well as I've been thinking of the presentations of people/concepts and stereotypes of rappers and hip-hop artists and if we will follow the usual practices of the industry or if will challenge aspects and go against the grain to convey a message.  In relation the information above...shall we copy the typical 'gangstar'  rapper look? Or will we (me [KdotC] the main artist and svf [the featuring artist]) go for a more humble costume choice that honestly represents our actual  for the music video. Let's look at some music videos we can take ideas and influence from to get a better understanding of what we want to do. 

Looking at Lupe Fiasco's Out of My Head Music Video

The song has a direct connection to our song so it was perfect to look for more inspiration to sharpen up our video for a re-edit. As the main artist is a rapper featuring a singer just as the main artist of our song is a rapper featuring a vocalist for the chorus, also the Trey Songz has a few adlibs in the song just as the vocalist gives adlibs to the rapper.

The first thing i noticed within the first 30secs of the video is the amount of quick cuts between shots of the artists, together and independently as well as the main actress with the main artist and the main actress independently.  This is something our video lacked we didn't give the audience an actual chance to get familiar with the two artists especially in the opening 30secs of the music video  which is essential for the audience to link the vocals and lyrics with the artist, especially with the image he was trying to create with his descriptive language in his lyrics. Also as soon as the vocalist was announced in the song there is a shot of him, to bring a face to the voice to introduce the audience to the vocalist for his fans to recognize him and attract new fans to him.

There was a great use of extreme close up shots of the main actress this is very important for hip-hop/rnb songs as it focuses the song on a physical human as the opposed imagination of the audience's interpretation of the appearance of the girl. The next time the audience get to see the main actress is her wearing a red dress which signifies an aura of romance around her making her attractive attribute look superior and she is the ultimate woman, as i said before that 'every man desires the woman in red' with makes more sense to why Lupe Fiasco is directing his vocals at 'her'. The girl in our video wasn't blatantly  wearing red so even though we were going for the sole representation of the girl in red it still wasn't obvious enough to be noticed by the audience. So we may have to make the leading actress wear more red clothes in her outfit and the leading actor to wear more too towards the end of the video.

Song Searching/Writing...

We are looking for a song to use,  it would be easy to take a song from my favourite artist that they didn't make a video for however i'v known that we will be directing a music video this year since last year and it was a dream to make a song with my first music video. So with these wishes in mind the brainstorming for a song idea began.....

Hopsin- The type of wild appearance
I would need for Hadouken 

After AS examinations fellow classmates and I discussed what we wanted to do for A2 regarding the video and song, their wishes were similar to that of mine and one of them produced his own beats named Martin. From then we started listening to his beats and thinking which ones we liked and ones that we could make good videos to, we chose a beat called Hadouken as i was inspired by the technique used in the beat called sampling. Here is the link to youtube video of the beat 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tERN-Sd-oKY' so i was set to write lyrics for the song over the summer, i wrote lyrics easily within a week i used my daily experiences as inspiration, however the characteristics of the persona in my lyrics was different from my usual persona of past written songs.

This an example of a dark video
with exaggerated shadows. Shot from video
  'Paranormal Activity pt 2 -Konan'

So this meant that I would need rebranding or to find a way to explain to the audience that i was trying something different from my usual musical concepts.  Daniel and I started thinking about how the video was supposed to look, if we were going to have a simple video with just cuts and transitions or if we going to have major need for editing and effects that would require a green screen. We also started to think of costumes, cast and locations for scenery. We wanted to go with a music video that had a cold, gothic theme.
Exaggerated shadows,contrast and probably some colour filtering. To give focus on an object such as a weapon or make an eye look extraordinary. It would also make the representative of persona look mysterious  which could be interestingly developed to make a better relation to the key lyric in the chorus 'Hadouken' and maybe make the persona look like he supernatural powers similar to the character from Streetfighter who has a move called 'Hadouken'.

So...we finally have an idea, lyrics, song concept so it should be simple correct? WRONG I came to the realisation that there would have too much time and effort into the process of things I would have to do to keep my audience informed enough for them to understand my motive behind the song. Also due to being  heavily accompanied and lack of communication together the group only decided we wanted to create another song entirely after a week into our A2. So we decided that a Love/'Sweetboy' song would be the song we going to do for various beneficial reason such as music artist image wouldn't need changing, it would be simple to make the video as clean as possible etc.  Martin (Magnificent) whose speed in producing beats lived up to his musical alias had a beat that would fit the song concept and i listened to it and let myself become entwined with the beat so i could produce lyrics that could blend together with the music.

Fl Studio 9

FL Studio 9
This is the software that Martin used to produce the beat, the program is called Fruity Loops 9 its widely used by producers and has a good user interface that can be comfortable to use after seeking help from tutorials.



With this notion i began to start writing lyrics for a love song and as i classed myself to be a romantic partner in past relationships i  thought it would be pretty easy to accomplish....but like most things in life it wasn't that easy but only took a few days for me to write the first verse.  It probably would have been quicker task if I didn't have other a  levels to attend to. The next verse came more naturally and within a week i had two verses ready and ideas of how i wanted the chorus to sound like.  I wasn't sure if i wanted the chorus to be sung or rapped so i asked around, asked Martin, the rest of the group and even my english teacher whose musical knowledge and interest in my creative concepts had always been profitable.

In the process of writing my lyrics theses songs were the most influential....

An artist's cover for Lady Brown

Nujabes - Lady Brown 
Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjqTiQhOgU8
This is a big song in the underground hip-hop scene Lady Brown is a great example of what a love hip-hop song sounds like, this inspired me to have poetic language in my lyrics that involved romantic imagery and more complex interpretations than the weak meanings in the words of commercial (pop) love songs.

A fan's cover for So Special

Lil Wayne - So Special featuring John Legend 
Youtube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U6qhYAgE1M
This is a song off Lil-Wayne's most recent album called 'Tha Carter 4' with soul-sensation John Legend, this song inspired me by its composition; Lil Wayne normally has a faster flow in his songs but he chose to rap slower in this to ensure that it targets a broad female audience and John Legend has a strong voice that really touches the soul of the audience.

The beat that Martin had given me was called Aloha, he named it this because he felt the beat took you to a tropical scene when you were listening to it, somewhere like the Caribbean islands.

Survey Monkey Survey:
We made two surveys on survey monkey to try research on what type of music our target audience enjoy listening to so we knew what impact we would have when the artists made the song.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9NW5WQJ
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LSRZM9V

Lyrics

Volas' Lyrics: Verse 1

 Travelling in busy terrains,via bus or trains. Tired of dull animation, manmade imagination. See a rare picture, ruth like creature. Like ancient scripture,so I wna lips ya. Use them to flatter, your perfected matter. With a sun-like smile, that promotes your style. Don't wanna call you bird, Your melodic dialect's unheard, a blessing to hear, let's baptise my ear.Lips are crimson like passport, my tongue passes this port. Our souls connect, I don't want to infect. Your gradually healed heart,I'll play my part. So don't back up,I won't act up, Take the man's role, take control, heal the soul, the x stole,be effective, better your bitter perspective. Of guys, show truth from the lies. Show fakes from the reals, my soul your aura thrills.

Verse 2

Get lost in your eyes, from midnight to sunrise,well it feels like that, when you look under my hat. To see my soul windows,I feel like I'm the one who throws,the clock,flying tick tock. Spinning in the air, like black silk hair, crowning your head, tender like rose bed. Yeah real peaceful, makes me so gleeful, looking at you, looking at you. You're like sweet medicine, take that back, you're sweet medicine, to my thinking brain. When dawn feels like midnight, things are looking dark, your like golden sunlight,making things alright. Sitting with ya, the greatest feeling, take away my, tribulations you're stealing. Pushing them in the open, after my long-holding,of them now,I hold you.

Bridge

We've had different foundations, varied pronunciations,but you call my name, the way I call your name. Problems don't matter, be joyful til the later,remember how we began, so bring it back now.

Chorus(SVF)We met at the corner store,we both know we needed more,thinking about the days before, happy that I didn't ignore you.(SVF)We met at the corner store,we both know we needed more,thinking about the days before, happy that I didn't ignore you.Saw you at the corner store,knew that I wanted more, never seen your kind before,someone I just can't ignore.

Sitting by the seashore, know that I want more, never seen your kind before, how can I ignore.

We met at the corner store,we both know we needed more,thinking about the days before, happy that I didn't ignore you.

(Volas): Your face I'm always... (SVF): Looking At You

When you walk past I'm always...           ''

You're face is best when I'm...                 ''

Everything's bless when I'm...                 ''