ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by addressing types of music videos that don’t tell a visual story at all to really appreciate Yola’s complex narrative web. It also examines an important cinematic term—mise-en-scène—which helps explain how music videos use settings and imagery to enhance these stories. The performance video is only one of many approaches to structuring narrative in music video. Furthermore, videos that are entirely performance-based are quite rare. Many videos presented in this chapter feature performance footage intermixing with other narrative types as the video unfolds. Most music videos often provide a complementary-narrative that reinforces some of the lyrics, but which also provides a slightly different spin on those lyrics. Narratives are rarely self-contained within the unique universe of a single music video. Music videos borrow narrative devices and structures just like books do (like every story that begins with “once upon a time”).
