Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Beautiful girls all over the world. . .

In the documentary Dreamworlds by Sut Jhally he describes the idea of a perfect woman for a music video vixen, a bimbo with dreams of having a man and a cold shower.  Although many artists make videos that are centered around the idea that women are these wet dream sex objects and ready for a man to scoop then up and take them to bed, there are many artists that show respect to the beauty of women. A great example of a music video that doesn't quite fit the mold of the dream women as represented Jhally's film, is music video for the song Nothin' On You by B.o.B feat. Bruno Mars. 




Many of the things that were discussed in the Dreamworlds film are not in the video first of which is the idea that women hunt men in packs and are always hot and horny. In the video it is made clear that women are predators who are on the prowl in packs to get men. In this video women are portrayed as much less sexual creatures, another example of this is that the women that are shown in the video are shown as women who are not dressed provocatively unlike the women in Jhally's video which showed most women in some type of swim suit, lingerie, or dominatrix outfit.

Sut Jhally had also made a case that the camera angles could portray the women in a sexual manner by either panning the women's body, zooming in to a sexual body part, looking from a distance at a silhouette, and avoiding to give the female a face/identity. The video Nothin' On You seems to do quite the opposite, not only do the woman not seem like sexual deviants but the beauty of the women's face is one of the most important traits that the camera is trying to capture. 





Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Please don't kill LeBron.

When looking at ads in can be very difficult to understand the intended meaning due to our cultural and ideological views. Katherine Frith provides us with a way of analyzing the layers of meaning in ads helping us decipher the advertisers intended meaning verse the cultural meaning of the ad. First by describing the surface meaning then the intended meaning and lastly the cultural or idealogical meaning of the advertisement. Due to my love of basketball and all things LeBron James I have decided to analyze a LeBron James advertisement.


When looking at the surface meaning of the Nike advertisement that I've chosen to analyze it is very easy to see the words, "Please, don't kill me" in the middle of the image, a large black man in a white sports jersey holding a basketball, and the words "Chron-illogical Disorder" very small in the lower left corner. 

Looking a little deeper into the advertisers intended meaning it is quite obvious that they are using the idea of transference by using a well known NBA Superstar as the man for the ad. Saying that this product can make you play basketball as good as LeBron can. 

The words in the advertisement are the key when looking at the cultural meaning. Not only is it LeBron James but the advertisement used the term "chron-illogical disorder" in this case it is obviously used as an urban term. When looking up "chron-illogical" it can be seen as a person who smokes to much chronic and loses all sense of reason or an "ill" person or skill which means sick, awesome, sweet, or fly. Both of these definitions culturally make the product more desirable. In the picture there are also numerous NBA symbols which associates the Nike product with the NBA which is every basketball players dream. Also in the eyes of a women there can be a sex appeal to how strong the picture makes LeBron look influencing their opinion of the ad.