Textual analysis of existing music videos

Tinie Tempah feat. Eric Turner - Written in the stars




Written in the stars is an alternative hip hop/ rap song by British rapper Tinie Tempah, the song also features vocals from Eric Turner, who is the lead singer of the band Street Fighting Man. I found this particular music video interesting because it is half performance and half a narrative story, which is what I would like to do when making my own music video . The performance side of the video includes Tinie Tempah standing on a rooftop in New York rapping, and Eric Turner sat in a white room singing and playing the piano. The narrative part of the video includes scenes of a young boy's life, throughout the video this boy is getting bullied, these scenes also show how him and his mother are living a financially insecure life. Within these scenes we see this young boy always writing in his notebook and listening to music on his headphones while he is alone, as the lyrics that Tinie Tempah is rapping fit in with these scenes, this shows that this young boy may be representing Tinie Tempah when he was a young boy himself. The way that Tinie Tempah is rapping on his own on the rooftop in this big city, could represent the loneliness that is trying to be portrayed in this song.
The genre of this video is shown in a few ways throughout the narrative story, for example the location of the video is mostly in a New York neighbour hood, a ghetto, as Tinie Tempah describes it in the lyrics. The mise en scene is also quite typical for the genre, Tinie Tempah looks as if he is wearing quite expensive clothes even though they are quite casual, he is wearing expensive sunglasses, which is a typical style for Rnb and hip hop artists as they always seem to show off their wealth and fame. As this is also a rap song, the typical mise en scene aspects of the video for this are that the young boy seems to be wearing quite cheap clothes compared to what Tinie Tempah is wearing, this is a typical theme for rap music as many rap artists base their songs and music videos on their rough childhoods, a lot of the time this is based on being brought up in a financially insecure family.

At the end of the video we see the young boy dancing on the same rooftop that we saw Tinie Tempah rapping on throughout the video, confirming that this child is representing a younger version of the rapper.