Bitter Sweet Symphony Analysis

The music video I'm analysing is Bitter Sweet Symphony by The Verve. It comes from the album Urban Hymns and was released in 1997. It was directed by Walter Stern who has worked with other artists such as Massive Attack, The Prodigy and David Bowie. The video is about a man walking down a street but in a straight line so he bumps into and knocks people over in the street. This signifies that the protagonist (played by Verve singer Richard Ashcroft) has a way of making his own way in life and stopping at nothing to achieve his goal and to do it by any means necessary. At the end of the video the rest of the band follow Ashcroft and the closing shot is of them walking don the street with that gang mentality you see in bands. The video comes across that Ashcroft is going on a journey, meeting and confronting people in society and life. The people could also represent the target audience of the record and the types of people that would listen to their music.
The lyrics and the video clearly connect with each other. For example, one lyric goes, "I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now/But the airways are clean and there's nobody singing to me now". You can't hear any of the noises being made by the outside world in the video, all you can hear is the track being played so Ashcroft could literally me the melody is cleansing his mind. 'There's nobody singing to me now', Ashcroft doesn't interact at all with the people he comes across in the video which signifies he uses music to shelter himself from everyone else to make sure no-one is bothering him.
Being as the video was released in the nineties, and the style of music that The Verve play, this would come under the category of BritPop. Male bands in BritPop were bands like Blur, Oasis and Suede who had a very distinct target audience of men who were patriotic and proud to be British. This is shown in the video through the body language of Ashcroft which makes you think he doesn't care about what anyone thinks of him with the swagger of his walk resembling that of Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. The editing of piece is made to resemble that of Massive Attack's Unfinished Sympathy, where it is just one shot following a woman down a street. Stern replicates that but then also sometimes cuts to things like Ashcroft's feet as he is walking and shots that show his point of view and whats going on in front of him. Stern is known to be a collaborator with Massive Attack, directing the video's of two of Massive Attacks most recognisable songs, 'Teardrop' and 'Angel'. What Stern has created with The Verve is one of the most recognisable British music videos and in Richard Ashcroft, cemented him as a brilliant frontman and one of the cornerstones of the BritPop movement, alongside Damon Albarn, the Gallagher brothers and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74