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Avicii - Wake Me Up Analysis

Lyrics
The lyrics tend to be about finding yourself and along with the message of the video, it is about finding who you are and being happy in your own community. Lyrics such as "All this time I was finding myself" enforce this point. The target audience for Avicii tends to be teenagers, and there is a general census with teenagers that they are misunderstood and are told they are too young to know any better. The lyrics at the start of the song say "They say I'm too young to understand / They say I'm caught up in a dream". This can result in teenagers relating to the song because of the aforementioned reason.
Music
The music is suited to more dance and house kind of music. The structure of the music fits with what is going on in the video. For example, when the music is slow and the lyrics are being sung on top of a basic guitar and percussion track the video is also slow paced i.e. when they are walking down the street it is in slow motion as they look at all the people who are staring at them. After the build up and the music drops the video is now much more fast paced i.e. when they are all dancing at the concert, or when the main woman in the video is on the horse.

Genre/mise-en-scene
The genre can be seen as a dance/electronic house track as the concert scenes in the video tend to follow that of other similar tracks. For example, the use of more shots of the people dancing in the crowd are used instead of shots of the artist, in fact the artist's identity is kept hidden in the video. The mise-en-scene shows the two girls at the start wearing more casual and modern clothes, as oppose to everyone else they meet in the area, instead they tend to have quite grubby farmhand clothes. The two girls tend to also be quite clean, whereas the rest of the town seems to be quite dirty or have some kind of ruggedness on their face. This can show that the two parties obviously have differences, and as the lyrics suggest that the two girls may not belong where they are currently. But once they meet people like them (wearing similar clothes and similar age) they all find that place where they belong together.

Camerawork
The camera works in many ways. It establishes the setting with a couple of long shots. Afterwards when they are walking down the street is uses numerous close up shots to capture the fear on the little girls face, as well as capturing the offended looks on the many people that look at them. There are also a couple of medium shots in there as well, to show that the little girl is staying close to the older girl because she is shown to be scared. Afterwards when the woman is riding on the horse there is lots of long shots/extreme long shots to establish the new setting that she has arrived to. During the scenes with the concert there are a mix of long shots and close ups. The long shots establish the setting and showcase the vast amount of people that have attended, it also shows the widespread joy of everyone dancing at the concert. The close ups are much more focused on the euphoria of the concert and shows peoples happiness in their facial expressions.

Editing
The editing is slow and steady at the start of the music video when the music is calm and quiet. It also tends to use a lot of slow-motion to emphasise the pace of the music as well as the tension in the narrative. When the music intensifies there is little to no slow-motion and tends to have many different cuts and short clips to, again, emphasise the pace of the music.

Intertextuality
There is no evidence of intertextuality.

Narrative/performance
The narrative and overall message of the video is that the two main characters in the video are somewhere that they don't appear to belong. They are constantly being stared and judged by the surrounding characters. They have a mark somewhere on their skin, and then they find others that are like them and have the same mark on their skin. They all travel together to Avicii's concert which is a place where they belong. There is a performance section which is when they are all at the concert which shows Avicii playing live, it gives them a positive image as their concert looks like an extremely lively place, and as the message of the video suggests, a place where people can feel like they belong.

Star image/brand
The band is portrayed in a positive light, they make the audience feel like that they are a group of people that understands them. If they don't feel like they belong where they do right now, they can escape and listen to music by Avicii to find some place where they actually belong.

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