How do music videos create a sense of collective identity?

“We need to replace all of these sexualised images with ones showing girls in positive settings” (Dr Eileen Zurbriggen). For example, the BBC News article called Sexualisation ‘harms’ young girls, states how the media portrays young women as sex objects, which goes on to harm girls mental and physical health. A good example of this is music videos, stars such as Rihanna has a certain ideology which allows her to have a hegemonic status towards society. Many girls aspire to be like Rihanna by wearing the clothes she wears, repeating her explicit lyrics and maybe even starving themselves to get a figure like hers. Rihanna represents herself as a sexual object by certain clothes she wears and her lyrics such as ‘Sex in the air, I don’t care, I love the smell of it”. Through stars and their music videos, many people construct and create their collective identity as they are highly influenced by their music and persona. Jacques Lacan’s ‘Mirror Stage’ helps us to further understand how the sense of collective identity is created, as this is how people start to develop their identity as they reflect behaviour they see, so they imitate behaviour that they may see rewarding, for example, Nicki Minaj dressing sexually and getting all the boys. This relates back to sexualisation as a person’s value comes only from her or his sexual appeal or behaviour, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is portrayed purely as a sex object.

“A star is an image constructed from a range of materials” (Richard Dyer), the image that the star creates and constructs can give a negative representation to society. As there are many people that construct their collective identity through the media, it can give a moral panic to society as there are many articles on how rappers have gone prison over gang wars or drugs. As this is how the star is constructed fans may imitate the behaviour and also believe it may be ‘cool’ to take drugs to fit in. Usually in the music videos stars allow themselves to represent their collective identity and as music videos have become less regulated and so have websites, this allows people to go to the extremes of representing themselves. Music Videos are also now globalised, therefore, people around the world can view it and construct part their collective identity from it. As David Buckingham states a focus on identity requires us to play closer attention to the ways in which media and technologies are used in everyday life and their consequences for social groups. Adolescence is a distinctive stage with a beginning and an end, a gradual progression to adulthood. The past is different for males and females and the dilemma is with what you will become. An adolescences progression is about “becoming” rather than “being”. Adolescence is about what you will become – regarding future occupations and relationships.
Web 2.0 has no regulations and therefore allows people to communicate and interact freely with one another. Music videos link with the Web 2.0 as they are constantly shared over Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc... Through the Web 2.0 people create and construct their collective identity as Henry Jenkins state “how teens are constantly updating and customizing their profiles online”.

Contemporary music videos have the technology and fewer regulations than historical music videos. Also contemporary representations are more explicit and lyrical raw than historical representations in music videos, for example, here we can juxtapose Michael Jackson with Lil Wayne and how they differ from lyrics and music videos. Michael Jackson was seen to representing positively in society whilst Lil Wayne is seen to represent negatively with society. Historical counterculture representations such as the Anarchy can also be juxtaposed with contemporary representations.