Andrew Goodwin: Analysing Music Videos

Walk The Moon – Shut Up and Dance

The Music Video

Shut Up and Dance - Walk the Moon

This music video shows the singer of the band trying to dance with a girl in a club. It’s like a ‘love at first sight’ moment. One good example of lyrics matching the visuals is where the singer is picturing themselves together as a couple in his head, you see them on a sofa with a big bucket of popcorn, to show a realistic relationship between a man and a woman. The lyrics at that point are ‘we were bound to be together’. The same thing happens in the next verse with the same lyric, it shows them 2 stood at an alter about to get married. There are also many other examples. The singer is portrayed to be a very shy guy, who isn't popular with the ladies, and the girl is just trying to tell him to ‘shut up and dance with me’ which you actually see her mime.

Lyrics and Visuals

At one point at the start of the song, there are a few bars without lyrics, and shows the singer’s mind after he sees this girl. You see two imaginary people wearing masks pulling thread through his ears, to show his state of mind. The colours make it also very mysterious and psychedelic. Also, in the instrumental part of the song, the singer is dragged away by a person wearing a mask, and starts dancing with the girl, and shows off that he is a better dancer than him and has more confidence.

Music and Visuals

This band were probably made famous by this single, and the genre of it is rock/electronic, which are both very popular genres nowadays. They try to portray a normal situations of young people, trying to dance with someone in a club o win their affections. The verses and gaps in this song also show your mental state to show our confidence when doing this, with the effects and transitions used.

Music and Genre Characteristics

To have a successful music video, you need something that appeals to men, women or both. This video appeals to both genders, as the duration of shots carried out are 50/50 between the man and women, but it appeals to men a lot, as he women is very beautiful, and men want to see themselves in a situation like this when they are out on the town.

Emphasis of Looking

In order for labels to reach a certain target audience they put little motifs/recurring images in the video to do so. In this video, they have used the same 2 characters to show a real situation, and they have set it in a night club, which also supports this point.

Demands of the Label

This video’s purpose is to entertain, and it does so with it’s humour. Towards the end of the song, we see that the mysterious dancer in the mask is the singer all along, and then the song stops and he dances awkwardly in front of everyone in the club, which is humorous to us.

Intertextuality