Women representation in music video

Media is meant to convey messages and communicate with people. Music is part of the media and for me, music videos are the ‘tools’ to help ‘music’ interpret the messages. If the lyric is talked about the “beauty of romantics”, women are the considerable ‘element’ to include in the music video. By using the method of denotation and connotation to explain the statement, denotation of ‘woman’ is ‘adult woman’ but depends on the cultural, woman more often seen by stereotyped images (mostly negative image) like weak and dependent on man, and this is called connotation thinking (Donna, H., 2015). In other terms of connotation towards women are ‘soft’, ‘hopeless romantic’, ‘sensitive emotions’ and ‘easily be hurt’. I take our Malaysia music video of singer Fish Leong, as an example. 

Screen shot from Fish Leong 'Time will passed' music video. Her music video has female model wearing white pyjamas to present sloppy look after heart broken from romance.

We can see her music videos are more prone to woman romantics-oriented. The female models in her music videos are mostly portrayed as a heart broken and having soft characteristic woman. In terms of clothing, they wear long white dress or pastel colour of clothing. From this case, they are trying to represent a woman as ‘pure’, ‘sensitive thinking’ and more often as ‘weak’ that the woman needs a man to comfort, in terms of connotation of women.   

We all know that associate women with ‘weakness’ is not good but we feel natural in a way and interested with it when watching one of these kinds of music video. Thus, there’s certain phenomenon of ‘Heteronormativity’ hidden within, where people has a district and complementary of thinking on gender roles in natural way (Wise Geek, 2003).

Bibliography

Csun.edu (2015) ‘Connotation and Denotation’. [online] http://www.csun.edu/ ~bashforth/098_PDF/06Sep15Connotation_Denotation.pdf [Accessed 25 June 2015]

Donna, H. (2015) ‘What is the connotative and denotative meaning of woman?’. Answers. [online] http://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_connota tive_and_denotative_meaning_of_woman [Accessed 25 June 2015]

Wise Geek (2003) ‘What Does “Heteronormative” Mean?’ [online] http://ww w.wisegeek.com/what-does-heteronormative-mean.htm [Accessed 25 June 2015]