Artist: The Killers
Year: 2004
Audience: 15-24
"Mr. Brightside" is a song performed by Las Vegas-based rock band The Killers. The song is featured on the group's debut album Hot Fuss and was written by Brandon Flowers and Dave Keuning. It was named "Song of the Decade" by UK radio stations Absolute Radio and XFM, and in April 2010 Last.fm revealed that it was the most listened to track since the launch of the online music service, with over 7.66 million plays scrobbled. In October 2010, it was voted at 9 in the Greatest Guitar Riffs of the 21st Century so far by Total Guitar magazine. (Source: Wikipedia)
The Killers' Mr Brightside is a mixture of both a performance based and a concept based music video. The performnce element features all of the way through the music video as it contains footage of the band playing their instruments and the bands frontman, Brandon Flowers, lip-syncing the lyrics to the song. However the majority of the music video is a concept based idea as there are alot of people dressed up in very weird and wonderful costumes, with really unconvenntional hairstyles. Another key factor that tells us that it is not a narrative music video and it is a concept idea is that there is no storyline in this music video and the lyrics do not fit in with what the actors are doing. It is a completely random idea that they have though of.
The opening shot of the music video is of the band on a stage and this is very strange as we do not know where they are or what they are doing there. When the band do eventually start palying we see that they are playing to an audience that are wearing outrageous costumes and straight away we know that this is a performance and concept music video.
Throughout the whole video there are short and sharp burts of the band playing but mainly of the frontman lip-syncing. These are the performance elements of the music video. The majoriy of the shots used for these performance sections of the music video are medium shots and close ups. This is because they want a variety of shots throughout the whole video and the concept sections mainly use more extreme long shots and long shots because there are so may people involved. Its not just shot variation that is a common code and convention in music videos it is also fast paced editing and this is certainly the case in the Mr. Brightside music video by The Killers. This is because they want their audience to be able to watch this music video over and over again and never get bored of it. There is so much going on in this music video it is hard to get bored of it because when you watch it again you find something you didnt see the first time you watched it.
The majority of the video is featured around this woman. Again just like all of the other dancers and actors in this music video she is dressed in strange clothing and she is wearing pale make-up. Her hair is also white which matches her make-up and makes her look ghostly. However, even though she looks ghostly, it seems the whole plot behind the music video is that there are three of four people fighting it out for her. Throughout the whole video she is with a series of men including the frontman, Brandon Flowers, and in the end there are a series of shots of them together as a couple dancing and kissing. However the very last shot is contradicorty to these shots before it as Brandon Flowers walks away from the woman as if he is breaking up with her. It is if this woman is experimenting wth all of the other men and cheating on them but the guys either don't know or don't mind. It is sort of a competition for this woman.
Here is the music video Mr. Brightside by The Killers:
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