In-depth Music Video Analysis

Analysis

MGMT – The Youth





This music video is an example of disjuncture, when a music video seems random and unconnected to the music. Though there could be some basic sense in it. The song is called and about the youth. When MGMT were just starting their career, they played a gig and they were booed off stage. A year or so later, they became very famous with the masses of young people and that’s what the lyric ‘the youth are starting to change’ may mean. Though there is this meaning to the song, none if it is resented in the music video which makes it difficult to analyse.

The music video is entertaining because of how overwhelmingly weird it is. It interests the viewer purely because it’s so unordinary. The mis-en-scene is an important factor in making the video what it is as well because of the hazy, 80’s, tacky feel it has to it. The cheap looking backdrop and disco ball which makes the video look like an 80’s school American dance/disco, adds to the tacky, amateur looking mis-en-scene. Even the children in the video look slightly eerie with their facial expressions and when they dance.

The song does seem slightly compatible with the music. When there is a verse, the camera will stay still as the children move round on a moving floor in a medium close up shot and mouth the words to the song. When the chorus comes, the camera is on three of the four children in the video in a long shot while dancing scruffily to the song. Lastly when there is an instrumental part in the song, either one of them or all of them individually are break dancing.

I love this video because it’s imaginative, weird and makes you remember the song which is something a music video should definitely do. You can easily forget a video with women shaking their bums or a talentless Cheryl Cole miming with a low top on, but this video is clearly original and it creates a music video genre of its own.