2. The song ‘Weathered’ was written by the artist Jack Garratt a one man band who produces an ‘Indy
Pop’ genre of music. Weathered was released on July 12th 2015.
Jack Garratt has recently won awards for his music, such as the BBC introducing artist of the year
and the Critics Choice award for the Brits.
The song Weathered has reached over 1 million views on YouTube and highly praised as one of the
best songs that he has written.
Due to his previous music genre being Blues, there are many hints of this genre within his current
music, this is proven as ‘Weathered’ worn by long exposure to the air and within the song we hear
many lyrics connoting with this idea of loss. For example “be the water to clench my throat”, these
lyrics show the pain that he’s experienced which are apparent in almost all of his songs.
The video was directed by Andrew Dohono, the video is shot in The Hills Canyons in Atlanta, Georgia
and shows three brothers experiencing many different situations, leading to a point where they
discover this fungi which once a year turns luminescent. The video explores love, memories,
happiness and sadness all through the combination of the visuals, sound and lyrics used.
3. Stuart Hall said that the text is encoded by the producer, and decoded
by the reader and there may be differences between different readings
of the same code. This is why the video only targets a specific
audience, furthermore the audience is influenced through the
protagonists of the video and the style which it has.
4. Age: The music video appears to target 15-40, it targets these younger audiences due
to relating to people who have these brotherly connections showing all the different
things they have experienced together, but also targets these older people as well as it
is almost showing the memory of these different experiences, leaving these people to
remember the times they had if they shared similar memories. The song was put on his
VEVO account and advertised through social media and YouTube. These social
mediums target the younger generation reinforcing his targeted audience for this song.
Gender: The cast within the music video are all Male, this shows how it is targeting
more of a male audience and although it focuses more on the family relationship
rather than the gender specifically, it still strongly shows what these boys do making it
more difficult for the female audience to relate. The lyrics used in weathered also
relate to both genders as he talks about the beauty and pain of relationships which can
relate to almost everyone. These stereotypical behaviours shown are mainly portrayed
to represent the innocence of the characters rather than to focus more on males than
females.
Ethnicity: The main audience for Jack Garratt’s music is White British and American
audiences, this is due to the places where he tends to do his tours at and the genre of
music is known to suit these groups of people, the narrative within the video also only
uses white male characters backing up this fact.
5. Jack Garratt often uses social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
This allows the audience to have an understanding of when he is going to perform
before anyone else has the opportunity, creating the social media sights to be quite
exclusive. This appeals more to the younger audiences once again as it is heavily the
younger generation who more use these social media sights and follow their favourite
artists. The audience are likely to wear quite casual clothing matching the items he
wears. He even sells his own merchandise such as clothes appealing to the audience
specific to him.
There aren’t many artists similar to him due to him creating all the music by him self,
whilst also performing by himself on stage, this shows how he’s established his own
audience which people can watch and enjoy. However, he has appeared to try and
spread his audience to a wider range as he has recently been on tour with the group
Mumford and Sons, whilst also performing with both James Bay and The Vaccines.
