Case Study: Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters

Foo Fighters is an American rock band, which formed in Seattle, Washington in 1994. They got their name from the UFOs and various phenomena that were reported by Allied aircraft pilots in World War II, which were collectively called "Foo Fighters". They were founded by Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl as a one-man project following the break up of Nirvana after the death of Kurt Cobain. 

Nate Mendel

William Goldsmith

Prior to the release of Foo Fighters' 1995 debut album Foo Fighters, which featured Grohl as the only official member, Grohl recruited bassist Nate Mendel and drummer William Goldsmith. 






"Best Of You"

This music video is performance based and is edited as a montage. 
The video portrays 'life in a nutshell' and how it can go from being chaotic, the car crashing and the rose dying, to all the happy things like the child being born and the couple in bed.  Andrew Goodwin's idea about how some videos either "Illustrate, Amplify or Ignore" the lyrics of the song is shown here. This video amplifies the lyrics of the song. 

 
"Long Road To Ruin"

This music video is mainly narrative based but it has elements of intertextual, parody and performance based music videos. The main narrative of the video is, a TV show and behind the scenes the cast doesn't like one of the actors. That actor the quits the show and starts a music band. As he is doing all this he is trying to impress this one girl who doesn't like how hes using popularity to impress her. The things happening in the video illustrate the song. The title of the song is "Long Road To Ruin" , and he is literally driving a car in the video and all the other scenes of the video is how he ends up ruining his life and a relationship and right at the end he drives the car off a cliff.



"Run"

This video is performance and narrative based. It's illustrating the lyrics of the video by showing the viewers that when you get old you should live the rest of you days to the limit, not sit in a care home and slowly die. They aim to show that they should be enjoying their last moments. They use role reversal near the end of the video where these old people attack a bunch of teenagers and steal their car, usually it would be the teenagers harassing the elder. This video also makes a reference to Michael Jackson's song 'Thriller' with the small dance sequence at the end of the video where they act and dance like zombies, similar to 'Thriller'.




"The Pretender" 

"The Pretender" is a performance based music video, which shows signs of conflict in society, as they had a group of police officers dressed in riot gear. 
This video could also be showing someone finding it hard to be understood by everyone else as he sings "what if i say i'm not like the others". 




                                                                                         

Foo Fighters' music videos create discussion and instead of being straight forward and illustrative they make you question and think deeper about the video and the lyrics. Andrew Goodwin said that different sub-genres have certain characteristics. For example, boy bands such as One Direction and The Wanted most of the time have some sort of dance routine in their music video. For rock bands their videos are almost all the time performance based. Using Foo Fighters as an example we can say that Goodwin was right. The rock band wants their audience to see them as a band.