Lyric Analysis and their Importance

Lyrics are used to help portray messages and meanings. By using lyrics it can help engage the audience and help them understand the narrative behind the song. They can also link with the moving images, of which we may see in the music video. This links in with Andrew Goodwin's theory that suggests that lyrics should go with and back up the moving images that you can see in the music video. Lyrics help to tell a story, and therefore produce and aid the narrative that may be more obvious through the use of moving images in the music video. Audiences can then hopefully relate to the lyrics and in turn like the song and connect with the piece of music. This can help link there emotions and feelings with the piece of music helping them remember the song. Lyrics can also set the scene and convey a message to the audience. 

Lyrics can be literal, for example the music video for the song 'Friday' by Rebecca Black. They are to the point and literally tell an obvious story, regarding her day and life. The music video for this can be seen below: 

These sort of lyrics are every straight forward, and the moving images of the music video then match this. However lyrics aren't always so literal and sometimes have deeper meaning to them. This can be seen below, in the Craig David 'Seven Days' analysis that I carried out. I started by getting the lyrics and analyzing the lyrics, based on what they say, to try and build up an idea of what I would expect to then see in the music video.

The image above are the lyrics of a Craig David song called 'Seven Days'. I carried out a task where I would try and analyse the lyrics, then once I had analysed them and tried to work out what I could expect from the music video for the song, watched the music video itself. By doing this it meant I could get an idea of how song lyrics influence the music video (or don't) and how the lyrics can be a good way of creating a narrative that the video can then show in moving images. 

However, I found that after trying to analyse the lyrics to as best of my ability, when I watched the music video for the song, it turned out my analysis was quite different to the music video and not what I expected. Some parts of my analysis were close, however other parts were completely different. Below is the actual music video for the song. 

Overall, lyrics are very important and can help to construct a narrative, which can make it more interesting for audience viewing by telling a story. However, sometimes lyrics can make no sense to some people, or at all anyone and have a personal meaning to the artist. This also helps us use our imagination, and can be a way of trying to get more creative ideas that we can then use in our actual music video that we are going to produce.