My group and I have spent numerous hours trying to decide the song. Yes, hours!
We are following a simple procedure of where we all listen to a song suggested by one of us and then we vote on whether we like it or not and whether we think we can use it to make a good, if not great, music video.
When deciding the song, we had to keep a few things in mind.
1. It shouldn't be longer than 5 minutes
2. Its structure needs to be cinematic enough to allow it to work with narrative visuals and elements like build-ups and climaxes.
3. It needs to be sung entirely by a male vocalist since our group has no female member
Our top choice was convincing Abdullah to create a new song for the purpose of our A2 music video but we agreed that it is indeed too much workload for him and shifted to looking at existing songs.
We considered "Resistance" by Abdullah, probably his most famous son, and while it could have been our winner, before we could decide Nestle bought the rights and asked Abdullah to perform it at their show Nescafe Basement which resulted in a copyright agreement which meant we couldn't use the song until after our A-levels result would have arrived.
So we decided that we will do what every group does and choose an existing song that one of them didn't create. We looked at multiple options like,
Everything In Its Right Place – Radiohead
Abdullah was really in favor of this because he thought "It’s so cinematic and beautiful and really lends itself well to imagery". The rest of us had our reservations especially because it seems a little difficult to create visuals for this that have a sense of motion in time and go with the beats of the song. Its compositional monotony also make it tricky to include the narrative ups and downs of a narrative into the video. By the way, this was a fan video and not the official video.
Hunger of the Pine – alt-J
This is a song that was generally like by everyone but the issues with this were similar to the reservations for the last one. There was also a considerable fraction of the song occupied by the Miley Cyrus sample and we didn't have a female actress to lip sync that part.
Dreams – Beck
This is one of the few that was loved by all of us; it is engaging, has a good tempo and is precisely off-kilter enough to work perfectly with striking imagery. The problem, it is 15 seconds over the time limit. There was the option of cutting it ourselves to suit our needs but Abdullah felt wouldn't have done justice to it in the edit and we agreed. We did make an attempt to find a radio edit but couldn't find a version that was downloadable anywhere.
Nikes – Frank Ocean
Saying that Huzaifaa hated this would be an understatement.
Little Dark Age – MGMT
This is another one that we almost settled on. It is perfect aesthetically, inspires visual ideas and we were considering something reto surrealist. However, it had a fatal flaw, in Abdullah's words, "it doesn’t really go anywhere. I mean it does, but the dynamic of how this song evolves is super nuanced, and you need big changes for narrative beats."
Signal – SOHN
This was Abdullah's favorite. He describes it as "On a purely musical level, this one is a masterpiece. It has the right length, structure, tone and I think it would’ve worked really well. It has some really striking and memorable sonic textures." However, the rest of us felt that it is too experimental and too slow.
These are just some of the prominent songs that we discusses, prominent in the sense that at least one of us thought they could really work. Some other options like "BeFoUr" by Zayn, "Bloom" by Troye Sivan and "Lazarus" by David Bowie were also considered but shot down too quickly.
I know you were probably expecting to see the song we decided at the end of this post but we are still undecided and this post is just to show progress. Hopefully, by the time of the next post we will have decided something.
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