Music Video Textual Analysis: Frank Ocean- Lost

Lost is from Frank Ocean's first studio album "Channel Orange"and falls into the Alternative R&B/Hip Hop. The genre of this song/album is quite difficult to distinguish but despite this I think this video implements some good features and follows some conventions of the Indie/Alternative genre which is the genre I will be basing my own music video on hence the reason for this analysis.

This song, a long with the rest of the album, has some very deep and subtle meanings behind it. Reading deeper into the lyrics it can be seen that many themes are being explored by Ocean such as his cynicism towards relationships due to his exposure to "adult ideas" whilst growing up. This song also hints at themes of trying to escape the same monotonous destiny as everyone else whilst still carrying on the pimp-hooker relationship characterisation from the song Pyramids.

Although this video may conform to conventions of several different genres, I am going to look specifically at the Indie/Alternative conventions that are conformed to as that my chosen genre. Elements of the Indie/Alternative genre can be seen throughout the video which shows how Ocean's genre is mixed and rather undistinguishable.

The video itself is mainly narrative but also with elements of performance. With the video being disjunctive, there are no relations between lyrics and visuals but the visuals do portray Frank Ocean's persona, mannerisms and gives the audience an insight to what his personality may be like. Coupled with the song, I think this type of video works well as it would be hard for an artist to illustrate the lyrics in a song such as this with some quite deep meanings behind them.

In terms of the relationship between the music and the visuals, the shots change in time with the back beat of the song which makes the disjunctive video seem to fit the audio. Also, as with many music videos, the lip syncing parts of the video connect the music to the visuals and also make the video seem more conjunctive.

Throughout the video there are many close ups of Ocean from differing angles in different scenarios as the video is Ocean and his associates casually exploring a number of different cities. This works well as the video appears very natural and not forces which eliminates the chance of bad actors/acting which can quite obviously ruin a music video. In all of Ocean's videos, the star image motifs would probably be Ocean's distinct dress sense which many of his followers would attempt to replicate. This is a reoccurring feature through many of his videos and is a good way to draw an audience to his videos as they would want to see his clothing throughout the video so they could attempt to copy it.

In reference to the "Notion of Looking" (a theory from Andrew Godwin- 1992), there aren't any clips which show females acting seductively even though some lyrics may have suggested that there may have been some such as "Double D, big full breast on my baby" but as this video is rather disjunctive there were no visuals to illustrate this lyric.

Overall, this video is disjunctive with no real relevance or reference to the lyrics although there are a few relations between the music and the visuals as previously discussed. As far as effectiveness, I think the disjunctive nature of the video works well with this particular song as the lyrics would be difficult (and maybe slightly inappropriate for some audiences) to illustrate though the visuals of the video.