Band Profile: Identity

Indie/Alternative

Pinterest ideasIn order to gather ideas of how we wanted our band to look, we created a mood board on Pinterest. We searched things like clothes, cigarettes, dark colours and other genre conventions so that we could refer to the mood board when coming to the actual creation of the band.

We researched images of the bands that have influenced us, such as The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys as their clothing and overall appearance (hair, makeup) so we can take elements and adapt them to our band’s appearance.

RepresentationTheories• Considering theories is important for us because we want our band/product to challenge a lot of

them. For example, Mulvey says how women are portrayed in videos/the media in general as sexual objects towards men. We have chosen to create a predominantly male band, however we aren’t going to include a love interest/sexual interest, which a lot of music videos and songs include. We’d like to create a rough, tough band who care more for music than scantily clad women dancing around in the background who are only there to ‘look pretty’.

• Hegemony is one theory (Gramsci) we have had to consider carefully, because our band is made up of males so it could be suggested that we are inferring that men are dominant (patriarchy being reinforced) but this isn’t the case – we aim to have a young band of boys, no more than twenty years old, and in society you’d typically consider older business men and wealthy men to be at the top of the patriarchal pyramid, not young ‘laddish’ boys, so we aren’t necessarily trying to say that they are more dominant over anyone and also to link to Mulvey’s star theory not being present, the band won’t be seen being dominant over women either.

Social groupsOf course social groups are important to consider when creating a product. Age is a main group as the band will attract a teenage audience meaning they will have to make the sound/ music appeal to that target audience. If the band wasn’t to do this then they may lose fans and may not have a wide enough audience.Gender is also a key group as these types of bands appeal to both genders depending on the band. However we found that these bands mainly appeal to girls so they would have to have that attractive look that girls like. With boys they may aspire to be like the band and have the same look as them, so the band would act as role models.Sexuality is a major element in the indie/alternative genre as the songs/ lyrics tend to be about sex and women, these band members are also known to be heterosexual.Regional identity is another factor as these indie bands are known to be white British boys, if there was an ‘indie’ from another country this would go against the stereotypes of the traditional indie band.

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