Music Video Theory Analysis 1

The music video that I am going to be analyzing is BTS’ Run. Bangtan Sonyeondan; also known as BTS is a  is a seven-member South Korean boy group formed by Big Hit Entertainment. Their genre including rap and vocals. The song “RUN” explains hardship through love and life; even if you’re going through a rough time,  you must continue life even if there are loads of negative aspects in the world. Throughout this analysis it is going to be based on Andrew Goodwin’s theory on music videos. The content that we can see in this music video is not your typical on stage, dance routine characteristics but it is mostly focused on a story line. For example, we can clearly see a young man holding a cup of coffee as he was about to dunk his lollipop onto the cup. It creates a feeling of wanting to know more about why the man has done it.

The music video did not entirely ignore the meaning of the song as they still included actions such as running, but a disjuncture situation was also relevant when we see the 7 males partying inside a living room. According to Andrew Goodwin, he believed that a music video can promote a song by the way it analysis the lyrics. This is shown in many music videos when a character/s does exactly what the song says. An example of this is when the lyrics for “Run” says “Let’s run run run again! I can’t stop running” In the actual music video, we can see 7 males running as if they were being chased.  This illustrates that the music video somehow uses certain shots to explain the meaning behind of the lyrics to their song i.e the song is called Run so they show clips of the male running.

Another example of when the visuals amplify the lyrics in BTS’ Run where seen in the gif below the lyrics says “ Everyone says it’s over, but I can’t stop, is this sweat or tear, I can’t really tell..” and the two male figures, who seem to be aggressively fighting is seen to be looking very emotional and in agony. This questions the audience whether something happened between the two male figures which also leads them to sympathise for the two. 

Goodwin identified that it is a common feature for record labels to use close ups of the artists in order to promote sales in the single or hit. This convention is highly used in order to show the artist throughout the video; mostly common for female artists as provocative angles are used to sexualise the artist. But however, from the music video that I have chosen, they did a short close up of one of the artist in the group; this is because it symbolises “lonliness” as he was sat down on the ground with flashing memories of a party with his friends which includes him. As the camera zooms into him, he gives a warm expression which makes us audience feel soothing about his character. However, as the camera zooms out, we notice that the rest of the male figures disappeared. This shows that a story line starts to build up which means that the music video itself has a plot that leads the audience into figuring out what it is all about.