Conventions/Rules

Here I will be looking at conventions and rules being used for Punk bands in their music videos. 

Examples of popular punk bands are:

-Rise Against

-My Chemical Romance

-Green Day

-Blink 182

A noticeable convention which the majority of punk music videos adhere to is having a lot of the shots in poorly lit rooms. When looking through punk videos it was one of the first conventions I noticed. Here we have the examples of this.

Rise Against - Saviour

Green Day -  Oh Love

Blink 182 - I Miss You

My Chemical Romance - The Black Parade

Then again, sometimes bands would purposefully go against these conventions and have bright music videos, to go for a different effect. Examples of these are:

Green Day - Basket Case

Rise Against- Prayer of the Refugees












My Chemical Romance - Na Na Na

 Blink 182 - All the Small Things

The most common type of music video for this genre is of the band playing the song in a large empty room, with a lot of raw emotion on display (usually anger). The videos usually cut between this performance and a storyline that is ongoing throughout the video (but not always). Examples of this type of video are:

Blink 182 - After Midnight

This video cuts between the band playing and a story of a young girl in a mental hospital who gets the chance to release herself and feel happy with a boy who comes to see her. Pictures of both sides are shown here.

Rise Against - Make it Stop

This is another video that cuts between the band's performance and a story. The story in the video shows 2 teenagers in a college being bullied for being homosexual, one a girl and one a boy. Pictures of both are below.

Also for this type of performance music video we can have a performance with not a story but something happening along with there performance which relates the lyrics. Examples of these are below.

Green Day - American Idiot

This video does not cut to a story, the performance part has it from the view of behind tv cameras to fit in with the lyrics that they don't want to be controlled by the media, and they don't want the nation to either.

My Chemical Romance - Teenagers

This music video has the performance of the band instead of a story, cuts to teenagers running into the hall they are playing in. The lyrics say that teenagers scare him because they don't care about anyone, and the clips of the teenagers show this as they are pushing and shoving, and generally being ignorant. At the end of the video the teenagers climb on the stage and snatch the microphone off the lead singer, as well as trying to take the band's instruments.

The clothing worn by punk bands in their music videos is always very similar. The most common colour of clothing worn by bands in these videos is black, whether it is black t-shirts, black trousers or black jackets, it is always in there somewhere. This is often because the lyrics in the song are about something in particular that the members of the band feel strongly about (like government, media, bullying etc), and the colour black can help to symbolise this. Here is examples of punk bands wearing black clothing in their videos.