The Smiths - This Charming Man Analysis

Genre
The genre of this song is indie, which can be seen in the video by the very low budget set. The Smiths are an indie band.

There is no narrative in this video - it is completely performance based. This could be expected from indie music of this time as it would be expensive to pay for actors for a narrative video.

In this video, Morrisey (the lead singer) is seen waving around a bouquet of flowers. This is a reference to their first performance of the song on Top Of The Pops. The people at TOTP wanted him to lip-sync the song so he said that there was no point going on stage with a mic and may as well use a bouquet of flowers.



As stated before, there is no narrative in this video.

The band is not portrayed as massively successful in this music video as they are simply performing in a room on their own. However, this is likely because of the low budget the video had.

The video is set in a very blank room, which reflects the band's name as they chose it because they thought "it's time ordinary people were successful" in the music industry - Smith is a very common surname. The font of the title saying, "This Charming Man" is also in a very plain font.

There are several close ups on the guitarist, Jonny Marr, as Marr and Morrisey are most commonly credited with the band's song-writing success.

Most of the shots are of a low angle, suggesting that whoever made the video needed to find a way to make the band seem successful and big.

The pace of the music video is quite slow, reflecting the simple band name.

As the music is independent, the institution had a relatively small role in the production of both the music and the music video - the band had more creative freedom.


Analysing this music video will help us as the lip syncing is very well done, so we will be able to take cues from it when we make our own music video. For example, we will have our actor actually sing the lyrics to ensure that the are breathing in the correct places.