Music Video Analysis of 3 No Doubt Videos: "Don't Speak", "It's my Life & "I'm Just a Girl"

I decided to also analyse a couple of music videos from a more current artist to compare and contrast...

No Doubt: the ska-influenced, Grammy award winning American pop-punk band, fronted by the peroxide blonde bob and throaty female vocals of Gwen Stefani, have a unique trademark style in their music and their image... yet they are still open to experimentation. This is evident through their music videos, which always deliver on a high level so I will be looking at three of their videos in order to compare and contrast and look at how their videos may have evolved over the years (hence, the chronology). The first one I will be looking at is "Don't Speak", arguably their biggest hit, from their 1995 album Tragic Kingdom; Next I will be looking at "Just a Girl" the first single released from the same album; and finaly I will be looking at a more recent video, "It's My Life" a cover track for their Greatest Hits compilation, The Singles, released in 2003.

"Don't Speak"

The begining of this music video sees band member, Tony Kanal, pick a fruit in an exotic Adam and Eve style garden. As the camera slowly zooms in to an extreme close-up the audience can see that the fruit is rotten. This may symbolise either forbidden fruit or the inner mould of something that appears ripe and fine may be metaphorical for the kind of toxic behind-the-scenes relationship the band portrays in the video. The video also concludes with this same orange-picking process, only in reverse, which ties together all the loose-ends. The lighting contributes to the cinematography of a smudgy, dream-like quality which is maintained to the performance in the garage with the sunlight flowing in. A tracking device establishes this switch of location & time. During this performance the band is sombre and slow as the camera does a 360 degree close-up around Gwen as she sings- to emphasize her status within the band, that becomes relevant later on. This juxtaposes to the archive footage of the band onstage, sweaty from the high energy show they're putting on, as the chorus kicks in. We are able to tell this is archive footage by the kind of grainy documentary way it is shot and it gives the music video some variety visually. The narartive elements tie-in during the second verse. In this video the audience is witnessing the disintegration of a relationship, whether it's fictional or relevant to the band's own history. The fundamental lyric of the song "Don't speak, I know what you're thinking" suggests the communication in this particular set-up is all in the expressions which say more than words could. The orange theme appears again as the band is doing a photo-shoot and the photographer take a particular interest in Gwen and slowly discards the other members of the band from the shoot, leaving her pouting glamourosly, bandishing an orange. A series of cut shots displays the band members individual reactions to this and the incident sparks of a series of disputes they have interwoven into their performance becoming more and more intense. In the segments of the band arguing the lighting is more dark and cast more shadows.

"Just a Girl"


"It's My Life"

The contextual features of this videa are not dissimilar to that of a 1940's film noir with Gwen embodying the role of a murderous femme-fatale, reminiscent to screen sirens such as Barbara Stanwyck or Jean Halow. Her "murder victims" are played by the rest of her bandmates