Conventions of ska music;

Conventions; 

Ska music tends to not have a narrative aspect to it and therefore the main one used is performance. This is because in most of the music videos for ska music you always see them playing their instruments which is an aspect of performance.

For example in the ska song 'Date Rape' the first thing we see is the band all together playing their instruments.

another example is 'Baggy Trousers' this song also uses the perfomance aspect and using instruments to show this. You can see in the background of this music video the two men playing the guitar which is part of the original track.

The audience from this can decode that a main part of Ska genre music is based on the focus of the instruments that are being played. It also draws their attention to how important they are


Another convention of Ska music is that is has no set order (narrative) and therefore is more spectacle as in most of the music videos the directors have used a mixture of locations to make the scene seem random.

Using the same songs 'Baggy trousers' and 'Date rape' we can see in both of them that the directors have encoded the randomized scenes into the genre to make it seemed jumbled up.

You can see that from these three pictures that the director has used different locations in order to mix it up a bit. This distorts the fluidity of the video, unlike if it was a narrative, which makes it more of a spectacle. This is enhancing how a convention of Ska music is to make it distorted and random through spectacle and performance.

The audience can decode that there is no set storyline to the music genre and that when watching a ska music video it'll be random. Usually in a music video for example if they were on a stage playing their instruments, the audience would be able to decode that they are playing to an audience and performing. But because ska music changes the location of performance or bases the performance element in a rural area it makes it more difficult to decode the reason they have filmed it there. But this is because the producer is wanting it to be random.









Also in ska music genres they tend to use characters in the background. As well as using the band in the music video as the main focus, to break it up a bit and fit with the random aspect they use characters to act out scenes in the middle of sections.

 

in 'Date rape' we can see that this women isn't part of the band but she is acting in the bar to show a different scene in comparison to them performing with their instruments. The audience can decode from this picture in particular is that a bar is related to getting drunk an loud which fits in with the songs upbeat tempo.

In 'Baggy trousers' we can see the children running down a pathway and they are not apart of the band but are characters with in the random scenes in between. The audience can decode from this picture to the right that they are running away from something, which looks like the school teacher which is decoded as them being naughty and retaliating. This can link in with how the director has encoded into the music video the personality of the band to match the scenes included, as throughout the video we see clips of the band members being naughty and mischievous.






we can link this to Halls theory. Halls theory consisted of three things;
preferred readings
oppositional readings
negotiated readings

the audience if they like the type of genre and music video they will have preferred it meaning they are wanting to decode it and they accept how the director has encoded it.
if they are oppositional, they may reject the preferred meaning and therefore means they might not like some of the conventions.
if the audience negotiate the readings of the conventions, they may understand the meanings of It but have no interest in the genre and conventions and therefore aren't interested in decoding it.