The document summarizes Goodwin's theory on the relationship between music videos and their songs. It discusses how the visuals in Foster the People's music video for "Call It What You Want" relate to the lyrics through strange and imaginative situations representing problems. It also notes how the music matches the peculiar visuals, and how the video demonstrates characteristics common to indie rock music videos through its colorful, spontaneous scenes.

2. SUMMARY OF GOODWIN‟S THEORY
• Relationship between visuals and lyrics.
• Relationship between music and visual.
• Labels demand close-ups of the tracks artists.
• Frequent references or looking and voyeuristic treatment of female body.
• Music Videos demonstrate characteristics towards the genre the band is in.
• Inter textual references between films, TV, music videos etc.

3. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LYRICS AND
VISUALS
• The video is very strange because it shows the members of
the band in the middle of some weird situations including a
man hanging from the ceiling with only his feet showing
and a hole in the wall getting larger and larger as the song
goes on, it links with the name of the song which says to
name it what you want, so all these strange situations
maybe fantasies or obsessive problems, this links with the
lyrics later in the songs where he says “we like to label
everything” which is an obsessive problem that some
people suffer from, I believe this is the main meaning for the
whole song, the visuals are their own imaginative way of
showing quite a sensitive subject to some people.
• The lyrics don‟t real match the visuals but the
visuals are showing some imaginative and
spontaneous situations that show problems.
“Call It What You Want!”

4. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN AND MUSIC AND
VISUALS
• The music is also quite edgy, as if it‟s slightly
• The music tends to get louder on out of tune, it matches the strange visuals
certain parts of the song, for example perfectly.
close to the end of the song the music
gets louder and the video starts to go
faster and the visuals become much
more colourful with sparks flying and
paint exploding, it matches with the
speed of the music almost like its
building up to a crescendo.

5. CHARACTERISTICS TOWARD THE GENRE
• Foster the People are an indie rock
band from Los Angeles, Indie rock
originated from the UK in the 1980‟s
and has grown in popularity ever
since.
• This video does have some
characteristics toward the genre
with some colourful visuals and
spontaneous scenes, it‟s a very
strange video but with Indie the
videos do tend to be a little
peculiar, other examples of
strange indie rock videos would
include MGMT‟s „Electric Feel‟
and Arctic Monkey‟s „Don't Sit
Down 'Cause I've Moved Your
Chair‟.

6. NOTION OF LOOKING
• There are slight scenes of voyeuristic treatment of women in this video including a few scenes
of women just wearing white shirts, due to the genre of music though this is really the only
scene in the video.
• Throughout the video there are many shots of the band members in various strange situations,
there are also shots of a group of women.

7. INTER-TEXTUAL REFERENCES
• This particular video doesn‟t feature any textual references but there are videos they have
produced that do feature many, this certain genre in music does have many videos that
feature scenes that are famous from films and television including Foster the People‟s earlier
track „Helena Beat‟.