Music Video Analysis (1)

Kangaroo Court – Capital Cities

Kangaroo Court – Capital CitiesKangaroo Court was released on the 7th of June,

2013, and was the second single from the group’s debut album.

Though not overly successful, peaking at 50th on the US weekly charts, it’s music video on YouTube has accumulated over 35,000,000 views.

The music video was co-directed between the two members of the group and Carlos Lopez Estrada.

Lyrics and Visuals The chorus repeats the phrase, “It’s a kangaroo court”. This is

represented in the actual video by placing a key scene in an actual courtroom, and by making all the extras animals, and having a kangaroo preside as judge, means that the creators took this very literally.

However, the actual meaning of the idiom is ‘an unofficial court held to try someone as guilty without good evidence’, which is also a prominent theme in the video as the protagonist, a zebra, is tried and executed simply for going to a club.

Other lines in the song have further connotations of law and courtrooms, such as “I commit the crime of wasting time”, “Yes, I am guilty, but don’t misunderstand me”, which is reiterated in the visuals that take place in an actual courtroom.

The opening verse reads as follows; “There’s a dark part of town where the girls get down and I cannot wait for a chance to go”, which is also represented very literally in the video as a club that the main character, a zebra, tries to gain entry to.

Music and Visuals The track itself is a key part of the music video. When

the zebra enters the club, the band on the stage are playing that song. The elephant playing the trumpet later appears, playing the instrument from the witness box in the courtroom scene in time with when the trumpet is played in the song. The elephant chosen as the one playing the trumpet is rather clever because of the pre-existing association elephants have with a trumpet sound.

Even in the courtroom scene, most of the extras can be seen nodding their heads and tapping their feet in time with the song, so it is definitely ever-present in the actual video.

In the club scene, we also see the other extras dancing to the song which the band are playing, with the zebra taking centre stage and also dancing in time with the actual music.

Genre and Characteristics The song is described as part of the ‘indie pop’ genre, and as

such uses tropes from both of those head genres.

The pop-based aspects of the music video are grounded in the reliance on dancing and singing – the performance that is present in the video, whether that be the dancing and singing of the protagonist or the performance of the band throughout.

Where this video differs from more traditional pop is in the more artistic nature of the events shown. A convention of pop videos is the reliance on advertising an attractive lifestyle featuring attractive people, whereas the indie features of the video, like dressing all the extras up as animals or the dark turn the narrative takes at the end, are unconventional of the pop genre.

Demands of the Label The label the duo are signed to, Capitol Records, is a subsidiary

of the Universal Music Group, and have a plethora of artists signed to them covering a wide range of genres, so the label itself have no real specialisation. Certain pop elements in the music video are perhaps more greatly emphasised than they would be if it were produced by an entirely independent label, such as the dancing, but overall much of the artistic integrity of the creators has been preserved.

That said, this track is very consistent with the rest of the artists’ work, in that it is somewhat more bright and upbeat than other indie-based songs.

Emphasis of Looking

The music video, leaning more towards the indie genre, does not place a great emphasis on sexualisation. The most prominent example in the music video is in the form of the female sheep character that takes an interest in the protagonist, who is somewhat ‘dolled up’, but the fact that the character itself is an animal nullifies much of these connotations.

Intertextual References

The obvious intertextual references in this music video come from the mise-en-scene of the courtroom, which as earlier discussed ties into the actual lyrical content of the song.