Music Video Analysis- Let It Rock

This song, “Let It Rock” by Kevin Rudolf and Dwayne Carter Jr. (Lil Wayne) This song falls in the genre rock as well as hip hop and these genre characteristics are very vivid throughout the music video. The video starts off with flashing lights and a man with his hood up and holding a microphone on a Mic-stand on a stage. One of the basic genre characteristic of a rock music video is flashing lights and sometimes microphones as well. In addition to that the hooded top implies that this music video this is from the hip hop genre. When the audience see this, they can instantly tell which genre or genres this music video will fall under so they already know whether or not this music will be the type of they usually listen without even having to listen to the lyrics.

There is an illustrating relationship between lyrics and visuals. In the video there is a part where they sing “let it rock” there is a long shot of Kevin and Lil Wayne are on the stage with their hands up and people in the audience jumping up with the song. By “let it rock” they mean lets all have fun and party so the director of this video got people to jump up with the beat to illustrate people having fun and partying.

There is also a relationship between the music and the visuals of this music video. At some parts of the video, the shot changes with the drum beats, so each time the drum beats there is a different shot.

As this music video is the debut song for Kevin Rudolf the main aim of it is to promote and sell the artist. This is done by constant close up shot and low angle shots of Kevin showing him singing, playing a guitar/drum or just him stand showing what clothes he’s wearing. All directors do that when it is a debut video of an artist because people will now know who he is so these range of shots will tell the audience more about him, in this situation, the director is telling it’s audience that Kevin is a multi-talented artist, he can sing play the guitar/drums and his clothes suggest that he’s a hip hop artist. Even though the camera doesn’t focus on Lil Wayne as much he is the main promotion of this music video because in the music industry Wayne is one of the top artist and the reason why the music will sell. This technique is used by nearly all music directors, when they want to promote a new singer they put them in a music video with an artist that is on top of the music charts for that genre to attract more audience.

There is a frequently reference to notion of looking. Everyone in the music video is constantly looking at the singers as they are on a stage singing and everyone is following what they are doing. This is again done to show that the main focus of this video is the two artists. There isn’t as much use of female sex appeal like all hip hop and R&B videos but still there is some. Every time there is a shot of the audience jumping up or just dancing to the music, the camera always focuses of a female but this is done so quickly that you don’t even realise.