Blur - Country HouseMusic Video Analysis

by Victor Chan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4Spl8jGnk

Theme and message

Theme of the song is about how Blur regard city and country. From the lyrics and the expression of the music video, we can see how much they hate city and their love towards country. They use many good techniques to illustrate this idea.

To get a better understanding of the song, we need to know what’s the message of the song. It is a good starting point to analysise.

city vs country

The first shot

The first shot starts with a long shot of a building, which is also an establishing shot to show you where this story happens. The zoom-in to that specific window tells you the exact flat where they are at.

gives you the first impression of the whole music video. It is also the opening of the story.

2nd shot: The members are inside the building!

zoom in

The 2nd shot: it shows all the members of Blur. They are all in a flat and close the curtains. It’s strongly expressing that they are isolated inside a flat. They are imprisoned, confined.

Key element of the video -Escape From The Rat Race

still in the flat:

They are playing ‘Escape From The Rat Race’, then the scene jumps to the plate of the game.

You can see the whole scene has changed to the game plate. All the band members are now trapped in the rat race game.

It is a metaphor of the city and rat race. They are all living in city as if they are playing a rat race game, which means city lives are endless, self-defeating and pointless. They are just lab rats running in a maze.

the next scene - on game plate:

Key element 2 -Country House

the country house

The representation of the country house is totally different with city. City is interpreted as a rat race, but country house is an Utopia to them.

Every time before the chorus begins, the camera will zoom or use other ways to get a close up of the country house’s door. It mean the character in the video now moves to the country house.

The lyrics used to describe the country house are very positive. Such as herbal baths, ‘watching afternoon repeats’, etc. All the words to describe the life of country house are very relaxing and peaceful.

jumps into it!

Images and lyricsWhen I just mentioned ‘Rat Race’ previously, the main scene of the video is set on the rat race game plate.All the subjects mentioned in the lyrics are illustrated to be the props in the video. There is a strong relationship between the lyrics and the images.

Music video is a visualised way to illustrate a song. Therefore, the images of the video mostly sync with the lyrics.

‘Thought to himself oops I've got a lot of money’ ‘I'm caught in a rat race terminally’

‘I'm paying the price of living life at the limit’ ‘It preys on him, he's getting thin’

The lyrics of the part which describes the life in city have the same expression. Because they are trying to express how they hate about the city’s life, the word choices tend to be negative. They use ‘rat race’, ‘limit’, ‘anxiety’ to describe te city’s life.

Instead, the life in country is much more relaxing. So the words ‘big house’, ‘rural charm’ are used to express this relaxing tone.

‘He lives in a house, a very big house in the country’‘Watching afternoon repeats and the food he eats in the country’

‘He takes all manner of pills and piles up analyst bills in the country’

‘It's like an animal farm lot's of rural charm in the country’

‘He doesn't drink smoke laugh, takes herbal baths in the country’

Those are some examples of how the images matches the lyrics. They used many props, such as money, rats, limit sign, etc to visualise their lyrics.

So the audience can easily get the situation of the story of the song.

The Editing Techniques are used to create many interesting tones

Fast motion:When you are filming a tragedy, use a slow pave. But if filming a comedy, use fast motion. This is quite a common rule in filmmaking.

In this music video, the part of the guitar solo is presented by fast motion. The tone of the guitar solo actually sounds brisk. Therefore all the shots and images are hilariously shown to match the tone of the guitar solo.

In this fast-motion part, the doctor is chasing the ladies and the ladies are chasing the band members. The whole set looks chaotic. It’s showing people relaxing themselves, doing something silly without a good reason. As if they just got released from stress.

Slow pace:

In a part with a slower pace, the images of the song and the cutting rate would also be decreased. Right after the guitar solo, the music break is the slowest part of the whole song. Therefore, the rate of the video has become slow as well.

I don’t use slow motion to describe this part because it really isn’t. But the idea of this part is just opposite to the part of fast motion.

‘Blow, blow me out I am so sad, I don't know why’

They don’t just share the same tone with Bohemian Rhapsody. They also want to refer to another song which the audience are familiar with, it creates a resonance to them. Both songs have a fast part and a slower part, the scenes with less editing are also graphically slow. The visual style totally matches the pace of the scene.

Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody music video

This part is actually an intertextuality links to the legendary rock band - Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody music video.

The music video of Bohemian Rhapsody is dark and sad. Therefore in Country House, a similar technique is used to share the same sadness which Bohemian Rhapsody also has.

effectively interesting for music videos

Jump cuts:

Jump cuts were considered awkward before. But in music video, due to the editing doesn't have to follow the continuity, but the beat of music instead. It perfectly fits the ridiculous and hilarious tone of this music video.

Audience would not like to see the images going like in films. The images have to move quickly because audience easily get bored in music videos. So we need a fast cutting rate and even jump cuts should be used in music videos in order to keep providing new, interesting images to the audience.

The Band Members should be shown so that the audience can access to their idols

Like many music videos of the bands, the leader (usually the vocalist) has the most screen time in music videos.

In Country House, there are total 14 close-ups of the vocalist - Damon Albarn are shown. It tells you he is the one who has the most attraction to the audience.

He is also frequently being the centre of frames. It shows his importance of the whole band.

But the other members, each of them has only around 10 shots of them. The screen time of members shows who is the most popular one.

Damon Albarn

It seems a bit unfair to the other members, Graham Coxon, Alex James and Dave Rowntree because Damon actually steals all the screen time. We actually cannot even take a clear look at the others; they almost don’t have any close-up. The audience can get any message from them. The whole song is presented by Damon. The audience cannot access to the other members. In theories, the songs are contributed by the whole band, so they should have a slightly fair screen time in the video.

Graham CoxonDave Rowntree Alex James

It is hard to say to explain why Damon has most of the screen time in the video, but we can guess by knowing who contributed the song, or even the band the most. According the Wikipedia, it doesn’t clear listing who wrote the song and lyrics on each song, but it claims Damon almost wrote all the songs’ lyrics. He is also the leader of the band. Therefore Damon is the focus the whole group, also the most valuable part of the band.

Similar situations also happened in many famous groups/bands. Even though they perform their music as an image of groups, there is still a most important member in a band. Pulp is a good example, Pulp and Blur both were famous Britpop band in the 90’s. They shared the same honour in the music industry. Pulp has an image as a group, but the one actually got honoured was only Javis Cocker. The rest of the members were not even widely recognised by public. The band was said could maintain good standard of quality music, even though there were 23 former members kept quitting the band. It means Javis Cocker was the only one has significant contribution to Pulp. As a result, Javis was also dominating the screen time of their music videos.

An image of a band is also important to be considered. Blur was a band with a young, rebellious image. Punk was not a new genre in the 90’s, but Blur’s Britpop style was still preserving the rebellion from Punk. Therefore, the visual image of the band is very important. Due to the image of Damon was said to have the most good looking of the band, the record label might want to show more shots of Damon’s facial expressions. It is also the reason for there are huge amount of close-ups for Damon Albarn.

The Representation of womenAccording to Andrew Goodwin’s elements of music videos, music videos usually contain sexual images of women. Women play a role of being sexual. It can be traced back to the silent film era when women were portrayed as showgirls. Nowadays’ music videos are still preserving this conventions. Even though the women are not exactly being showgirls, the representation of them is still sexual and suggestive. The reason for it is they wanted to attract audience, especially males keep looking at the music video. It is hard for the audience keep watching for a few minutes, so they provide images of female bodies as an extra spice. Male audience would have imagination of the female bodies.

It also shows what’s the social status of women in this video. Since the theme of the song is about the stress in living in city compared to the relaxing life in country, it emphasises the relaxedness of living in country. Therefore, they use a lot materials and items to describe the relaxing life of country, such as watching tv, having herbal baths and eating all day to show how comfortable it can be. They use females as their desire, by putting them into the scenes of country house, to emphasise there is anything men want.

The women in the music video are dressing fashionable. They are costumed to be men’s desire and catching men’s attention. There are also many shots of showing their bodies, like wearing short skirt to show off their legs. It doesn't only happen on their clothes. For example, there is a scene which the ladies are taking herbal baths, they raise up their legs in the bath. Also during the guitar solo, they are being chased by men, it shows the men’s strong desire of women.

The last shot

The last shot goes back to where it begins.

Now they’ve opened the curtains as if they free themselves. Then the camera zooms out back to the long shot of the building. The world of the frame has suddenly become wide. They are not trapped inside the building anymore. They are now watching the big world.

As a conclusion of the music video, it responds to the first shot.

zoom out

Then it pans left to show you the outside world and the country side outside the city. It’s a good technique of storytelling. Because they didn’t show you the world outside the city in the first shot. But now they show you the world of freedom is just right in front of you.

pan leftLooking to the big wide world~

Aspect Ratio

The music was made in 1995, when Internet was not even popular. Due to the limit of Internet, television was the most effective way to broadcast music videos. The TVs in 1990’s were still mainly made in 4:3. Therefore, this aspect ratio perfectly fitted the house TVs perfectly.

Aspect ratio is a practical way to reflect what media the music video is shown.

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3

If we trace back to the time when the music video was made. We will know what kinds of media they used to exhibit this video.