Dizzee Rascal Dream and Formation analysis

Analysis.




In this music video Dizzee Rascal starts talking about him and his friends when they were younger and they thought they knew everything and thought they were kings. Also we see "mother" who used to do all these educational videos to children on whats right and wrong. This makes this video better because it is an educational video almost due to Dizzee talking about his childhood and the mistakes he made and what he thought was right back then.

In his second verse he talks about how his priorities changes and started focusing on music and that was all he wanted to do and how he is thankful to everyone who bought his album which made him grow. All he cared about was performing/ making music and getting his money as fast as he could.

The final verse is the most influential in my opinion because he then starts to talk to the younger generations saying they can go pretty far if they put their minds to it and stop worrying about "your mans" as they will still be there in the end if they are real. I think this is quite powerful because it is coming from someone who doesn't want other youngsters to waste their potential on small things and go out and do bigger things to make the world better instead of doing nothing. 

Visually the video looks pretty old and has a few puppets and toys going around however I think that was the aim for this because "mother" used to do her shows a while back so they wanted to try re-create that same feeling again. There wasn't much in the way of colour but again I think

Technical codes for this would include a lot of editing to make the puppets and old toys such as the flying helicopter to look real. As I was saying in the visual section they would have edited the video to look quite old/ basic to get the same feeling as what "mothers" show would have been like back then.

Audio codes for this video would have been the non-diegetic music and the voices from Dizzee and "mother" for us to hear.

Overall, I think the video uses all 3 codes pretty well to try and get that old video feeling and I think it is very informative and even influential to young people to try and stay on track and not lose focus or do things that may muck up your life. 




At the start of the video we see Beyonce sitting on a car that is slowly sinking throughout the rest of the video to show that the power of the police was getting smaller and smaller. Also everything else behind her was also flooded and the video was shot in New Orleans to show everyone how devastating it was.

During her second verse she talks about how she slays, I think this could be seen as a form of female empowerment because she's dressing how she wants and doing what she wants showing that she doesn't really listen to what people tell her today but she is confident in what she does and wants other women to look at her feel the same way and not be pressured by society.

A counter argument for this could be that the way she dresses could defeat the whole point of trying to show female empowerment if she's going to wear minimal clothing and dance provocatively. However some people will also argue that she is doing what she wants which shows female empowerment so both sides have different points to argue.

In her third verse she talks about if she wants something she will work and grind for it until she gets it. This may be seen quite positively because she could be saying that if you really want something, work hard and be persistent and one day you'll reach your goals. This could be compared to Dream as Dizzee was also saying put your head down and work for it and you'll reach your dreams.

Overall, I think that even though it may not be the first thing you get from the video if you look deep enough there is positive messages in there such as keep working hard for your dreams and promoting female empowerment.