Analysis Of Music Video - 21st Century Brakedown - Green Day

From analyzing 21st century brake down by green day it helped me see the different ways of which music videos from my genre are perceived. The genre that this music video falls in is pop rock. The broad characteristics that the video has are the typical band and instruments; the drummer, the guitarists and the main singer; these characteristics are very common in this genre. Also the song itself is very typical of this genre as its all about emotions and point of views. The song gives the impression that he is talking about himself as he uses the word “I” a lot. It speaks a lot about the 21st century and how things have changed and become ironic.
There is a certain relationship between the lyrics and the visuals. In the video we see some of the lyrics animated on like a wall. In a clip the wording “21st Century Brake down” was written on the wall as they were singing it. This technique helps the viewer be more involved as it makes you read; giving you something to do rather than just watch. Another way that the visuals have been linked to the lyrics is by showing what they are saying by using different clips fro different situation. For example in the song he sings “Born into Nixon” showing an American flag, then he carries on to sing “A welfare child” where he has a man holding a baby with the American flag behind him. By doing this the artist makes the lyrics understandable and something that you would want to keep on watching purely because the lyrics are so good that you would want to know what the next illustration will be. I think this a good technique to incorporate in my video as it holds your attention.
Additionally they use clips of the band using there instruments to the beat to illustrate a clear relationship between the music and the visuals. We see this near the beginning; this is done so that we can recognize the group firstly and for them to then illustrate the instrumental parts of the video. This is common, as most artists from this genre have sections of instrumentals in there videos. This video also uses the cutting of clips to add to the effect of the beat. This makes it very appealing as it catches your eye and makes you sense the beat of the song. The pace of the song changes and this is clearly seen in the video because of the illustrations. For example when they have writing splattered on walls sometimes the last letter of the text tends to drag on onto the next clip.
This video uses a lot of effects as up until the last verse of the song is when we get to see the band perform with no effects on them. Like they will use a black and white effect but with no grayscale so we only get to see what’s black and what’s white, this effect is mainly used on the main singer. I realized this because there are a lot of close ups of him, I think this is because he uses directs about himself. On other clips they use loads of different artistic effects on the images themselves and then they add on background effects to match the lyrics leaving not much to the imagination. This solely makes it seem like rely on portraying there point of view by imagery and lyrical explanations.
The record company is playing along with the type of band that they actually are; for example, them saying it how it is; making it lyrically smart with apparent visuals, making the viewer observant of their surroundings by putting bold images to them. Green Day are well known for there apparent music making every video they do more noticeable. In other videos such as “Wake me up before September ends” they went for a more simple approach to it, but still not leaving much to the imagination as they use a lot of narrative in that particular song. In this video they use the notion of looking as they has scenes where we see them through another screen and we see a boy watching into a dozen other screens.