Narrative and Performance in Metal Videos

Joel Senior

How Are They Used?

• Narrative in metal videos mostly all link in with the lyrics of the song. It tells the audience the songs deeper meanings that aren’t always deferred by the audience. The narrative depends solely on the lyrics.

• Performance in metal videos are very common and are used for songs that don’t always have a deep meaning that could be put into a video.

Narrative

• Iron Maiden’s song ‘Different World’ is a narrative based video that is very disillusion and tells the story of living in a bizarre universe, like a video game. The animated video shows no sign of the band performing.

Performance

• Slipknots 2009 release ‘Psychosocial’ is one of my favourite performance based videos, purely because the pace of editing works perfectly with the songs energy. There is no storyline to the video, just the bands performance.

How they Intertwine

• The way that narrative and performance link together in metal promos is often very discreet but similar to that In a rock promo.

• Often, in some videos, the performance is thrown in-between narrative, like Metallica’s ‘The Day That Never Comes’.

• The performance shows the band in full costume/make-up and the narrative uncovers a story.