WS - Deconstruction 4 - JCB Song - Nizlopi

Artist - Nizlopi

Song Title - JCB Song

Year - 2005

Genre - Folk/Pop

Director - Laith Bahrani



I decided to look closer at this song and it's video, simply because it is so unusual and is a very good example of a concept based music video. The song actually has it's own website, with a lot of information about the song as well as the band and the ideas behind the song. 


The genre that this song best fits into is folk music. Folk music is defined as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes and as music with unknown composers. The song fits all of these categories to place it well in this genre. The song was produced on the label FDM Records, a family run independent label. This also makes the song an Indie song.


The reason that this video is unusual and a concept based music video is because of the visuals and how they are created. VFrom the videos that I have viewed so far, the visuals have generally been the bands and/or actors performing in roles. This video however, is very different and is an animated video. The beginning shows a notebook opening and the visual images of the video are shown inside this notebook. Th whole video is animated and tells the story relating to the lyrics.


The images or drawings on screen directly link to the lyrics of the song throughout. A couple of examples of this are "And we pull over to let the cars pass" and "And we're holding up the bypass" where, as the lyrics are sang, the visuals match exactly. These are just two small examples of what happens throughout the whole video.


Despite the visuals being animations, there is still lip-synching in the video. Luke (seen in the picture, top right of the blog post) is looking towards the screen for the majority of the video and can be seen saying the words to the song.


This song is actually another example of a band or song-writer using past experience as an idea for their song and to express their opinions. The lead vocalist for Nizpoli, Luke Concannon, is dyslexic and got bullied for it as a child. The song is actually a recollection of what happened when he was a child when his dad would take him to work with him instead of sending him to school. An extended story about this can be seen on the JCB Song website.


As previously mentioned, this video is concept based, however, as is normal with concept based videos, it also has aspects of Narrative to it. The whole video is explaining and following the story of the lyrics, making the video Narrative based as well as Concept based.


The main points to take from this video are:

• The use of personal experience in videos/songs by some artists.
• The visuals beginning before the lyrics.
• An animated video can be very effective, but would also take an extreme amount of time and skill.
• Unusual ideas and 'thinking outside the box' can be very effective and lead to an extraordinary and different video. 
• This song matches the visuals almost exactly throughout, this is something that we could consider when making our own videos.