Music Video Semiotic Analysis

The music video from Vampire Weekend for the single 'Oxford Comma', directed by Richard Ayoade

This video points fairly clearly towards the indie genre. The fact that it is mostly natural lighting, contains few visual effects and is shot on location is typical of indie music videos due to their low budget. Also this video is not performance based and contains very little complex choreography as opposed to pop videos. They also show the conventional and iconographic instruments for indie bands, like the drums, guitar, keyboard and bass.

Oxford Comma: a comma used after the penultimate item in a list of three or more items, before ‘and’ or ‘or’ (e.g. an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect).

Ezra Koenig (the lead singer) discussed in an interview that the song "is more about not giving a fuck than about Oxford commas", which I think is also made obvious in the first line 'Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma'. The video also seems to be shot in one take and always as a long shot, and I think this may link to that theme as the uncut shot represents the lack of, and unimportance, of grammar.

To me, the simple and clear structure for the video, which is put into chapters, represents how he thinks that everything should be as simple and easy as this.

There are many postmodern culture references in this video, the main one being style references to the American filmmaker Wes Anderson. They copy stylistic techniques such as tracking shots, slow motion running, extras in silly costumes, on-screen text in Futura font and picturesque freeze frames.

At 1:01 a woman dressed in green with a bullet belt satirically pretends to shoot one of the extras, introducing an old western theme to the video.

The costume of the band is stylised to the 1970s theme of the video. They all conform to a colour scheme of black, white and blue, wearing either a suit or a pullover jumper over a shirt. They are dressed this way to promote the eccentric and vintage style the band have. The mise-en-scene illustrate the 1970s theme further, for example the pieces of technology the cameraman and reporters use at 0:45 are classic and dated movie apparatus.

Another meaning I interpreted from this video was that he thinks that everyone should stop trying to be the same and perfect all the time because everyone is different. I think this is portrayed through the lyrics 'I met the highest lama, his accent sounded fine to me' and 'check your handbook, it's no trick, take the chapstick, put it on your lips', which has a visual representation of different people sat around the lead singer wearing different clothes to him and they are all comfortable with what they're doing. Lastly, at 2:07, Koenig walks past four other extras who are wearing the same clothes as him, have the same guitar and are copying his actions, adding to this theme of everyone wanting to be the same.