Surrealist music videos

Music videos that have a surreal style are those influenced by the surrealist movement. Surreal works of art, including music videos, are designed to be unnerving and illogical, containing the element of surprise and unexpected juxtapositions. They are meant to be expressions of the unconscious mind and therefore are filled with strange and dream like imagery.

Chris Cunningham is a director of many extremely strange and unsettling surrealist music videos. Some are like nightmares, more disturbing than many horror films and filled with weird imagery. His videos for Aphex Twin, most notably Come to Daddy and Rubber Johnny are filled with freakish characters. Come to Daddy features an old women in a grim urban landscape being terrorised by a group of little girl’s running riot on the estate. The little girls all have exactly the same grinning faces, that of an adult man (actually the face of Aphex Twin himself), creating a very disturbing and strange juxtaposition. The music is very hectic and industrial sounding and this helps to give a very unforgettable and unsettling vibe to the music video.

Less disturbing, but equally surreal, are the videos for Radiohead’s Street Spirit and Coldplay’s The Scientist. Street Spirit features a combination of slow motion and sped up footage (sometimes in the same shot) and all sorts of nonsensical and strangely placed imagery such as jumping nuns in a trailer park. It is all black and white and the song is very slow, adding to the surreal and dream like status of the video. It was made by Jonathan Glazer, the director behind the brilliant horses in the surf Guiness advert. There are similarities in the way the music video and advert are shot, showing a clear link between the two mediums.

Coldplay’s The Scientist is less surreal perhaps and more linear in its storytelling though the the narrative is told completely backwards. The footage has been reversed leading to much that is strange and unexpected. The most surreal juxtapostition though is that lead singer Chris Martin appears to lip sync the song even though the footage is in reverse. He had to learn to lip sync the song backwards in order to achieve this.

Surreal videos, if done well, will last long in the memory of viewers and can perfectly suit certain types of music. The sad music of Radiohead and Coldplay is fitting in creating a dream like atmosphere while the harsher more hectic sounds of Aphex Twin make the perfect soundtrack to a nightmare.

What are your favourite surrealist music videos?

Narrative Music Videos

Narrative music videos are those that tell a story. There are many different ways a story can be told in a music video. A narrative can be edited alongside the performance of the artist so that the video cuts back and forth between elements of performance and narrative. Sometimes the artist can be involved in the narrative in some way and can even be lip synching as they act in the narrative. In other examples the artist can be performing in the same location as the narrative is occurring. Having a narrative generally means there is a clear beginning, middle and end but sometimes narratives can be a bit more abstract and actually the narrative progresses very little from the start to the finish.

Narrative music videos often help to tell the story that is already present in the lyrics of the song and other times the narrative is more of an open interpretation of the lyrics or seems almost completely unrelated. Narratives engage the audience by providing enigmas and mystery. Audience will want to see how the stories will end because they will have questions they want answering.

An example of a very cinematic narrative music video is Eminem’s Stan, featuring the actor Devon Sawa playing an obsessed fan and also Dido and Eminem who sing and rap in the song. The video follows the story present in the lyrics of the song from Stan writing letters to Eminem to eventually killing himself and his girlfriend. Devon Sawa plays Stan and he lip synch’s Eminem’s lyrics until the last verse where Eminem is writing a letter back and then he appears in the video. It references Eminem’s fame and his problems with obsessive fans and the lighting makes and subject matter make it feel almost like a horror film. This video even has some of the sound effects from the narrative audible in the song such as the car splashing into the river.

The music video for Just by Radiohead sets up a very big enigma. A man lies in the street but will not tell anyone why. Throughout the video the audience will be questioning what the problem is with the man and what will happen. The performance of Radiohead is intercut between the narrative scenes and it also becomes clear that the room that Radiohead are performing in overlooks the street where the man is lying. It has a kind of twist ending that will hopefully surprise the audience. This sense of surprise will also likely be present by the end of The Scientist by Coldplay which all plays out in reverse.

eminem - stan from Im Daebum on Vimeo.

What are your favourite narrative music videos? 

More on styles, conventions and techniques of music videos:

• Surrealist music videos
• Animated music videos
• music genres
• as live/in concert
• Parody music videos 
• Homage music videos