Music Video Analysis

Lil Wayne – How To Love

The narrative category that this video falls into would be an illustration due to the way in which the video is used to illustrate the meaning of the lyrics and visualizes the music in a straightforward way. But even though the lyrics are shown in the video in a straightforward way the idea of the video is very unique and requires creative interpretation from the audience. The video includes a very mature and in some ways upsetting storyline with actors, but it does also includes the main star throughout a majority of the video, lip-syncing, which gives the video an edge as its not the typical performance you would expect from the singer (Lil Wayne). Again, unlike most of his videos Lil Wayne isn’t very much in the spotlight throughout this video so the audience has a chance to view and understand the story within the song. There is no clear intertextuality within this video as the singer is very individual to himself

"Lil’ Wayne sits with his guitar rapping the lyrics while real life situations take place like rape and single motherhood."

The camera shots within How To Love include various extreme close ups/close ups mainly of the star (Lil Wayne) but also the other actors within the video this shows the facial expressions on these actors and considering this video is full of emotions these type of cameras shots can really show the audience the emotions of the various actors. These close ups also show various other important things within the video such as the scene in the strip club the close ups are mainly based around money which implies that money is very important to the girl, and within this story.

The speed within this video is very slow cut and the camera movements within each scene are very slow. The majority of this video is montage editing from different locations, of different actors and even from different time zones as this video is showing the life of the main character from when she was younger. You repeatedly see the main star Lil Wayne in often the same position and same location throughout which has been placed in between other cuts of the video through editing but this works very well considering the type of performance and story based video it is.

There are many different locations throughout this video such as the back alley in which the main star Lil Wayne is based and then changes to the hospital, a school, a house and many others. The lighting in this video is not highly based around the main star which is very unusual in this genre of music as the singer is usually the main part of the video but instead he is very in the background and when he is shown during the video the locations he is in are very plain and the lighting is very dark which implies that the attention is purposely not meant to be on him throughout this video. The mis-en- scene is well thought to fit in with the type of environment the actor is in for example when she is outside a school the actor is dressed in a graduation gown and hat so the audience can understand what is happening within the scene, whereas the main star is dressed very informal in pants and a vest which again shows that this video isn’t about him but instead the story he is trying to put across.