Song 2
Blur
Blur is a British band that was formed in 1988, since when they have released 8 albums: Leisure, Modern Life is Rubbish, Parklife, The Great Escape, Blur, 13, Think Tank, and The Magic Whip (which was released in 2015). Song 2 is from the band’s fifth self-titled album, and reached #2 in the UK singles charts in 1997, got to #163 in 2009, and #64 in 2012. The album itself reached #1 in the UK and Irish charts, and #61 in the US Billboard, and overall sold over 2,000,000 copies worldwide.
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The song’s music video was released on YouTube in April of 2009 and has garnered over 60,000,000 views in that time, and is a performance video with conceptual elements, as the band playing instruments takes precedence over everything else. The conceptual elements come partway through the video as the band start flying around the room and are blasted with wind.
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The video follows conventions of indie/alt rock closely through how it presents the band and the sort of music they were producing at the time, as it was in this album that the band decided to make tracks closer to alternative rock, due to them listening to more American bands in the same genre. Because of this, the harsh loud song is reflected by the music video in several ways, one being the lighting which is low key throughout however high key lighting is introduced and starts to strobe midway through the video, which reflects the loud and erratic song itself.
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Moreover, the song uses multiple camera angles in quick cuts which follows the erratic tone that the sound and the lighting created. As the video goes on the cuts get even quicker and the video ends on a cut to black as opposed to a fade, which many music artists do in their music videos. The band themselves are in casual costume, wearing t-shirts and jeans instead of any planned or predetermined costume. The casual costume makes the band more relatable to the audience, and reflects one of Dyer’s paradoxes as they appear both ordinary and extraordinary – ordinary through their costume, and extraordinary through them playing instruments and flying around the room.