To analyse a music video, watch it straight through once, then take it apart in layers: the image with the sound off, the track with the picture off, and finally the two together, noting where the edit, the camera, the performance and the lyrics line up and where they pull apart. Treat the song as the primary text and ask what the images do to it: do they tell a story, illustrate the words, build an identity for the artist, or argue with the music? Ground every claim in a specific moment you can point to by timestamp. Context about the director, the artist and the history of the form comes last, as a test of your reading rather than a replacement for it.
Know what a music video is for
Any honest analysis starts with the fact that most music videos are commercial objects. The encyclopaedia definition of the music video describes it as imagery integrated with a song "for promotional or musical artistic purposes", and notes that modern videos are primarily a marketing device. That does not make them less interesting. It means every choice also serves to sell a song and shape a public persona, and a good reading keeps both functions in view.
The scholarly literature took a while to treat the form seriously. Andrew Goodwin's Dancing in the Distraction Factory (University of Minnesota Press, 1992) was praised on its publisher's page by Simon Frith as "the first to treat music TV as vision and sound", and by the musicologist Susan McClary for taking videos seriously "as complex cultural texts involving music, visuals, stars, and much else". A year later Frith, Goodwin and Lawrence Grossberg edited Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader (Routledge, 1993), which set out to challenge "easy interpretations" of the form as promotional vehicles, filmic images or postmodern culture.
The most practical book for anyone writing analysis is Carol Vernallis's Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context (Columbia University Press, 2004). Columbia's description frames music video as "a distinct multimedia artistic genre, different from film, television, and indeed from the songs they illuminate". Its table of contents doubles as a checklist: narrative ("telling and not telling"), editing, actors, settings, props and costumes, space, colour, texture and time, lyrics, musical parameters, and the connections among music, image and lyrics. Close analyses follow of Madonna's "Cherish", Prince's "Gett Off" and Peter Gabriel's "Mercy St."
Watch in layers
The layered viewing method works because sound and image compete for attention. Separate them and each becomes easier to see.
- Full viewing. Watch without pausing and write down your immediate impression in a sentence or two. This is a hypothesis to test, not a conclusion.
- Image only. Mute the sound. Note recurring shots, locations, costume changes, shifts in lighting, and how the camera moves.
- Sound only. Look away and listen. Mark where the verse, chorus, bridge and any instrumental break begin, where the beat drops out, and where the vocal changes register.
- Together again. Now compare your two sets of notes. Does a cut land on the beat? Does the chorus bring a new location or a wider shot? Does anything happen in the picture that the music ignores?
Tools help. On YouTube, the official keyboard shortcuts let you step forwards and backwards one frame at a time with the full stop and comma keys while the video is paused, slow down or speed up playback with the less-than and greater-than keys, and jump to any tenth of the video with the number keys. Frame stepping is the easiest way to count cuts in a fast passage or catch an image that flashes past.
A simple four-column page (time, image, sound, idea) keeps notes usable. Record timestamps so your final analysis can point to evidence.
Read the image
Film studies gives a useful umbrella term: mise-en-scène, everything placed in front of the camera, including set, lighting, costume and performers. Ed Sikov's definition, "the totality of expressive content within the image", is a good prompt to look at the whole frame and not only the singer's face.
Work through the frame deliberately:
- Setting. Where are we, and does the place change? A move from an enclosed room to open space, or the reverse, is often structural.
- Colour and light. Note the dominant palette and when it shifts. Then ask whether the shift lines up with a change in the song.
- Costume and props. Objects that recur usually matter. Track how they change rather than treating each as a fixed symbol.
- Framing and camera movement. Close-ups, long shots, a static camera or a roaming one all set different relationships between viewer and performer.
Musical history is often visible in the frame. The encyclopaedia entry notes that Madonna's 1985 "Material Girl", directed by Mary Lambert, was closely modelled on Jack Cole's staging of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Spotting a quotation like that changes the analysis: the question becomes what the video does with its source.
Follow the edit and the structure
Editing is where a music video's relationship to the song becomes measurable. Count cuts in a verse and in a chorus. Note whether shots are long and lingering or short and percussive, and whether cuts fall on the beat, ahead of it or against it.
Then map structure. Some videos follow the song's verse and chorus shape closely; others impose a separate narrative. Michael Jackson's "Thriller", directed by John Landis, was conceived as a short film, and its history records that Jackson and Landis conceived it as a 13-minute short film, with a budget much larger than previous music videos, referencing numerous horror films. Analysing it means asking how the narrative frame, the dance routine choreographed by Michael Peters and the track relate. The Library of Congress made it the first music video inducted into the National Film Registry, in 2009.
Craft can be part of the meaning. Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" (1986), directed by Stephen R. Johnson with claymation, pixilation and stop-motion animation by Aardman Animations and the Brothers Quay, was shot frame by frame, with each second built from 25 separate poses, according to the song's history. Johnson and Gabriel wanted a video that would be satisfying on repeat viewings. Knowing that tells you to look for density of detail, not a single storyline. It won a record nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987.
Hear the relationship between sound and image
The core of any analysis is the relationship between what you hear and what you see. Three broad relationships are worth naming:
- Illustration. The images act out the lyrics. Effective when it is witty or precise, flat when it is merely literal.
- Amplification. The images do not illustrate the words but heighten the mood, energy or identity the music already projects.
- Disjunction. The images pull against the song, so that meaning comes from the friction.
Childish Gambino's "This Is America" (2018), directed by Hiro Murai, is a clear case of disjunction used as structure. As the song's documentation describes, the first shooting in the video, 53 seconds in, coincides with a musical switch from a folk-inspired melody to dark, pulsing trap. Dancing choreographed by Sherrie Silver, including the South African gwara gwara, plays in the foreground while chaos unfolds behind. Murai said the video was inspired by the films Mother! and City of God. A careful analyst would note the timestamp of the musical shift, describe what changes in the frame at that moment, and only then interpret. The video won the Grammy for Best Music Video at the 61st Grammy Awards.
Also listen for sound that is not on the released track: dialogue, ambient noise, silence before the music starts. These additions are deliberate and often reframe the song.
Place it in context, carefully
Context sharpens analysis when it comes from evidence. Useful questions include who directed the video and what else they have made, where the song sits in the artist's catalogue, and how the video was first released and seen.
The history of the form supplies yardsticks. Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" video, directed by Bruce Gowers, was recorded in four hours on 10 November 1975 at a cost of £4,500, partly so the band would not have to mime the complex song on Top of the Pops. After its success, record companies made promotional videos a regular practice. In 1981 MTV launched by airing The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star", directed by Russell Mulcahy; YouTube's arrival in 2005 let artists such as OK Go build their reputations largely through videos seen online. Lyric videos and vertical videos for phones are more recent formats with their own conventions, so judge a lyric video by what it sets out to do.
Awards show what the industry rewards, which is context rather than proof of quality. The Grammy Award for Best Music Video was first presented in 1984 as Best Video, Short Form, and has gone to performers, directors and producers since its first two years. That crediting is a reminder to name the director in your own writing.
Write the analysis
Good music video criticism moves from description to interpretation to judgement, and keeps the evidence visible.
- Open with the approach. In a sentence or two, say what kind of video this is (performance, narrative, conceptual, animated, a hybrid) and what it appears to be doing with the song.
- Choose two or three moments. Give timestamps. Describe each precisely before interpreting it.
- Explain effect, not just technique. "The cut rate doubles in the chorus" is description; say what that does to the song.
- Mark uncertainty. If a reading depends on an association you cannot confirm from the video itself, say so.
- Credit people. Name the director, and where known the choreographer, cinematographer or animators.
For more on writing criticism about music and visual culture, artculture.uk publishes guides across the arts. Watching with a critic's attention changes how you hear a song.
Photo: NJM2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
