Song Research

Here we will look in detail at our song choice "The Weekend" by BIBI & 88rising released in 2021. This blogpost is created by me (Rara)

The Weekend - BIBI

1. Song Background

"The Weekend" by 88rising & BIBI seems to be about a relationship in which one person is not fully committed. The first verse describes a woman who parties all night and is only interested in being with the singer when it benefits her. She expects special treatment just because she is with him. The chorus suggests that she only contacts him on the weekends when she wants to be intimate, and he feels used. He is jumping off the deep end to be with her, but then she disappears until the next weekend. The second verse implies that this behavior breaks the speaker's heart. The bridge indicates that the singer is willing to be available for the woman when she is lonely but knows that she is not a good fit for something long-term. The outro is a repetition of the earlier lyrics and perhaps a reflection of the singer's feelings of being used and wanting more from the relationship. In sum, the song is a critique of a partner who only wants a casual relationship and does not want to invest in a genuine connection.

resource: https://www.songtell.com/88rising-bibi/the-weekend#google_vignette 

2. Why we choose it

When I initially heard this song, I was surprised by how intimate and sexual the music video was. And at first I wasn't really into how dark and neon the MV's aesthetic was, but me and my group decided to subvert the whole music video, as we all were only fans of the song itself, not the MV. We enjoyed how the music wasn't too slow-paced but also not as fast-paced as others; in my perspective, it was quite neutral. With parts that were empty, leaving room for us to add scenes that we believe would fit our target audience and keep it engaging. As we wanted to evoke a more bold response toward our audience, we believed that having a strong and complex narrative would make the audience think of how each scene would portray our artist to be 'bad' in the end. 

3. How your music video will be different 

As we can see from the music video, it's quite graphic and sexual for our target audience (teenagers), which is why we will subvert the whole MV by adding a narrative throughout our whole music video, as in this MV it just depicts the artist being the bad guy due to her only contacting the guy on the 'weekend.' Thus, we will mainly focus on our artist having a soft girl vibe during the beginning half of the MV, which will be shown through mise-en-scene (e.g., hair, location, clothes, and makeup), and then slowly nearing the end of the MV, she will have a whole different vibe, which is going to focus on her being a playgirl depicted through mise-en-scene and our whole narrative. Due to us wanting our visual elements to fit the upbeat melody this song has, by adding a strong narrative, it keeps the audience engaged due to it having a twist of the artist being a soft girl -> playgirl. 

Additional Research 

Grease (1978) this is what narrative we will most likely follow as it showcases the girl mc being a soft girl -> cool girl and the boy mc being a cool boy -> soft boy. But in our MV we will only showcase the girls perspective as she is our star and we want to focus the limelight on her, having our boy mc in the MV only being shown for a couple scenes to indicate how our artists feeling has changed for the boy mc overtime. The use of outfits of the girl in this movie is also similar to the approach were trying to go for, for our artist once her playgirl side gets shown. 

Self Reflection: Creating this song research was actually quite tedious in my opinion as we have so many  different scenes and I wanted to show each scene with clear descriptions but it was quite hard to compile everything to 1 paragraph. Our group also decided on this song for quite a while because we started off with many slow pace romantic songs but we ended up wanting to go for a more fun and creative narrative while still having romantic aspects to it as from the beginning we still want our MV to have some type of love scene because our group was more drawn to that concept. Because according to the binary opposites theory it is the conflict of these opposites that drives a narrative forward, so by having the artist being in love to not caring at all creates a conflict between her 2 personalities this then allows the audience to understand that she became cold hearted due to her being heartbroken by her situationship.