Music Video Analysis: Carley Rae Jepson - Call Me Maybe

Carly Rae Jepson – Call Me Maybe

This music video’s storyline is based around the attraction of a female to a male neighbour. The female, Carly, tries her hardest to get the man’s attention by somewhat embarrassing herself for him. She goes off in a dream at one part of the music video to a place where she is hugging and kissing her dream man and when she wakes up, the dream man is standing over her. She then makes him watch her sing her song, but at the end as she writes down her number to give to the man, the man walks over to one of the band members and gives him his number signifying to everyone the reason why he wasn’t paying attention to Carly is because he is gay. The video then finishes with a gutted shocked face from Carly.

Voyeurism: The pleasure of looking at the band members.

Carly Rae Jepson’s music video of ‘Call Me Maybe’ is a good example of voyeurism as the main 2 characters are attractive. This means that people will view the video for the attractiveness of Carly and of ‘the boy next door’. The voyeurism will attract people who wear the same clothes as the two characters and may affect people to dress the same as them. This video would be less successful if there weren’t any attractive actors in the video. This video conforms to Goodwin’s point of voyeurism. 

Selling the artist:

To sell the artist in this video, most of the shots were of Carly Rae Jepson in a variety of different outfits, but always looking to impress, which is the aim of her song to impress, so it works. She is sold to the audience as a young adult looking for a relationship with the guy next door. This means she is single and available if she is or is not in real life. As she is attractive and single the male heterosexual audience may fancy her and watch her videos and buy her music because of this attraction. As you watch the video and listen to the lyrics you might get the impression she is aiming her words at you and she is offering her number to you.

Lyrics/ Visuals:

At some points in the video her actions or shots in the video match up to the lyrics but not very much. An example of when they do is when she said ‘skin was showing’ it cut to a shot of the man taking his shirt off. At the end when she sings, ‘call me maybe?’ the man makes a hand phone and puts it against his head and mimes the words ‘call me’ to one of the band members. But generally the video doesn’t relate to the lyrics exactly. The entire song is however about meting a guy for the first time and trying to get noticed by him and get his number, which is what the lyrics are saying. Just before this happened, Carly is writing her number down on a piece of paper to give to the guy next door, which reinforces the fact that she wants him to call him.

Music / Visuals:

The music of the song is all major, which gives us a light hearted image of what the song will be about. The music has a medium tempo, not slow and not too fast. The music represents Carly’s optimistic approach about finding love with the boy next door. She is showing off her logic to be, if you have confidence you can do anything, she is showing confidence in herself to attract the boy without even talking to him. The Mise-En-Scene of a sunny day reinforces the optimism that Carly possesses about going out with the guy next door, if she was lusting after him but was depressed about it, the weather is more likely to be cold and raining, with the music being much more dull and depressing. The tone of the song is major and happy up until right at the end of the song, where the song cuts off using the sound effect of taking a vinyl record of a record player and her showing a shocked face when she finds out why he has been ignoring her, because he is gay.

Genre:

The genre of ‘Call Me Maybe’ is pop, and pop videos focus much more on the sexual element of the artist than how ‘hardcore’ or ‘wild’ they are. There are many shots showing Carly Rae Jepson looking attractive. This fits in with the song’s lyrics and video as she is trying to attract a guy’s attention, and the first stage of that is to make yourself look appealing to him. Throughout the video she gets more daring at catching his attention by doing a car wash wearing a short skirt and a loose vest. So the genre of pop conforms to Goodwin’s theory of music videos.

Intertextuality:

There are not very strong intertextual links in this music video, at 1 point in the video, one of the band members does a moon walk – this is referencing Michael Jackson. There is another time in the music video where Carly gets knocked out and has a dream about being ‘happily ever after’ with the boy next door – which is linked with a fairy tale ending.