Research music video 3: "It's raining men" Geri Halliwell

The single released by Geri Halliwell on April 30th 2001 and marked an important part in her career as the Spice Girls had just broken up. During her time in the group she had become known as "the fat one" of the band. This video's goal was to relaunch Geri's career and change her image from "the fat one" to be known as a somewhat sex symbol with her new body and hair style.

‘It’s raining men’ by Geri Halliwell is in the mainstream pop genre of the music world. Within the music video Geri is seen performing in many locations; this shows that the video is a location performance based video. The music video has some narrative which mirror’s the movie flash dance giving the video intertextuality but never comes back to it.

The music video creates three different representations of the same artist. The first is created in the ballet scene. The fact she is performing ballet makes her seem sophisticated and controlled because these are general connotations of what ballet is. However, she is being watched through the male gaze in the form of the judge (Mulvey’s male gaze) so there is still a sense of sexuality and men lusting over her even in this sophisticated representation which creates the impression she is not as innocent as she seems.

The second representation is based on the Use’s and Gratifications theory, the part about relating to the artist. This is created through Halliwell lying in her house with a dog which helps make her look like a much more, down to earth person and therefore the audience will find it easier to relate to her and would want to consume her media more. However what she is wearing still creates this voyeuristic message from the previous representation.

The stereotypical representation of a pop genre, is dancing, performance, over crowdedness, bright colours and all around positive feel. The music video contains dancing and the performance element which makes it feel more like a pop song. The most common colour's used are reds and yellows, again all really bright which helps to strengthen and emphasise the image of a pop song. 

However, there is some juxtaposition to this. At the beginning of the video, Halliwell is performing a ballet routine, uncommon of the pop music genre and this helps create more sophistication, elegance and in a way a sense of posh to the video and the song which helps it to appeal to a higher class audience. This does however soon into the real song and the pop genre conventions appear which removes the sophistication and elegance because the bright colour's and overly happy dancing do not connote elegance or intelligence.

The visuals and lyrics work well together, some even link. The song is about raining men, the rain part is illustrated within the music video towards the end of the video. The lyric “Raining men” sounds very visually hard to link to the lyrics but in Geri’s video it is handled well. On that lyric a bunch of dancing men flood the room Geri is in resembling how rain come’s in all at once and suddenly.

The editing in this video is done very well, it cuts beat to beat to different shot’s and when this happens it cuts to Geri in different outfits such as yellow hot pants and locations like a tight close up of her running down a hallway or standing near a staircase. This leaves the music video to have a very energetic and vibrant feel as there is always something new to look at and it never sticks to the same shot for too long. At the start during the ballet scene it’s really slow paced, matching the music, but as the music increases in pace so does the cuts of the shots, and in the big chorus at the end it’s very fast paced. The pace increases as the music increases.

Another way the video is made to feel vibrant and energetic is through the colour scheme of the video as it has a very 80’s vibe and you can see the dancer’s in the video wearing vibrant colour's such as yellow and red’s.

This video sells Geri Halliwell very well, It shows off her new body mainly with close ups of her legs, bottom and chest (Over sexualised parts in the media) which was her new image at the time. There are many close ups of her body and face throughout the video to attract the audience (Mainly male – The Male Gaze created by Laura Mulvey). The video also does more than just supply a woman to look at to attract an audience (Which would only attract a young audience) it also is a great use of intertextuality to try and attract an older audience. The video makes connections to two older brands (Fame and Flash dance)  in an attempt to try and make the video more appealing to an older generation as they may be able to recognise these references while younger people may not.

How this influenced my planning
This influenced my planning as it made me aware of how to use intertextuality well and how to create 3 different images for a star at once a useful skill , but apart from that this song is not useful for my planning due to the genre change I am doing indie while this is pop.