Analysis of videos within our genre: Disclosure - When A Fire Starts To Burn

The genre of this song is electronic, with an influence from soul music in the looped vocal sample which was taken from a speech by Eric Thomas. The soul influence is mainly represented in the video through the iconography of the African-American inspirational speaker which takes up the first minute and and a half of the video. The main genre of the video however, is electronic music, which is represented through the characters dancing, although the video also defies conventions of the genre as the people dancing are middle aged rather than being teenagers or in their twenties, and are dancing in a hall in the daytime, rather than in a nightclub. In addition to this, instead of showing the producer who has made the song, the only musician shown is an elderly man playing the drums. This connotes that the director of the video has self-awareness of the genre, and has chosen to parody it more than fit into it.

The narrative within the video is based around an inspirational speech, which the audience then overreact to and become uncontrollably dancing and causing facial expressions, to the point where the man delivering the speech is no longer able to control them. It then cuts to a woman who is watching the same speech on television, who begins to become brainwashed in the same way and performs the same motions as those who are in the room. The narrative themes within the video are ones of subservience and power, as the one man who is preaching to the audience and on TV is the most powerful character, as he is the one who has the power to make the other characters act how they do. Most of Propp's narrative structure is present within the video, as there is an equilibrium, when the people are being preached too and are reacting as would be expected. There is a disruption, which is when the song begins in the video and the audience begin to become taken over by the message within the speech. There is also a recognition of the disruption, which is when the speaker starts calling the audience up to the front, in order to manipulate the trance-like state which they are in. There is no real resolution of the disruption, as whilst it is arguable that the disruption is resolved when the speaker collapses, those around him do not stop, meaning that the disruption isn't ended within the video. This could have been chosen by the director in order to either allow a follow up video to be made, or to leave the video on a cliff-hanger ending with the audience left to wonder about what happened afterwards.

The main focus in the video in terms of representation is religion, and how it can be used in order to brainwash/manipulate people. It isn't clear about what the speakers motives are until the shot showing the TV screen encouraging viewers to dial "1(800) PRAY-HARD", which clearly shows that the video connotes how easily religious preachers are able to get people to follow their views. This is a negative representation of religion, because it connotes that it is something forceful which people are unable to escape - this is another reason as to why the video ends on a cliff-hanger, as it represents religion as being something which is inescapable once people have been indoctrinated into it. 

There are only two settings used in the video, and one of them isn't introduced until nearly three quarters of the way through the video. These two settings are the run-down hall which the man is making his speech in to a small number of middle-aged people, and the other a woman watching the speech on television in her lounge. However, the cuts between the two settings for the rest of the video are used to show how the way the people in the room are being indoctrinated in the same way that the woman at home is being, in order to suggest that it is also happening to many others who aren't shown in the video. Only using two separate scenes could have been due to budget constraints, with the video being released before the band had released the song as a single, or could be in order to keep the video simplistic, as the overall narrative of the video is one which is fairly easy to grasp by any audience.

The target audience for this video is likely to be the opposite of the characters which are shown within the video - this is very unusual, as music videos are usually created with the uses and gratifications theory in mind, part of which says that videos show characters who the audience will want to be like. However, in this video, all of the characters are middle aged, whereas the music is targeted towards people between the ages of 15-30, as electronic music is seldom associated with people older than this age. Through showing the characters as being so different to the likely audience members, the director is again able to self-parody the genre which the video fits into, in the same way he has manipulated the setting of the video from what would be considered conventional. In terms of socio-demographics, the video is most likely to appeal to those within the B, C1 and C2 categories, as the middle, lower-middle and skilled working classes are most likely to be interested in the electronic genre, and thus will enjoy seeing how this video parodies the genre to a certain extent.