video analysis

For this post I am going to analyze a music video of the song "like a rolling stone." The song is being played by the rolling stones, but the lyrics are exactly the same and the song changes very little from Bob Dylan's original version of the song. I choose to use this video with the rolling stones playing because it was the only video that I found that did not change the song and offered an interpretation of the lyrics.

http://www.veoh.com/videos/e103756XM2AGkPm

The Rolling Stones interpret the song as I did at first. As a story about a girl character falling from having high social status and popularity to being washed up and on the streets. They view the song as a tragic story of a girl falling to rock bottom. The video implies that the girls fall was the result of drug use, even though there no scenes of the character doing drugs. I am able to infer drug use because of two things the first being how the view on the video becomes distorted when they show the girl after her fall. As if trying to show the distorted view of the world drugs cause. The second reason I infer drugs is that when they show the girl after her fall she does not look healthy. Not only does she look like she has not been taking care of herself, in terms of hygene but she is often struggles to stay standing as if intoxicated. The video implies that the character ends at rock bottom.

I thought that this interpretation of the song was much to simple, and that the video was only analyzing part of the lyrics. The video is broken up portraying three different types of scenes or times in the characters life. The girl washed up, the girl when she had social status and money, with the Rolling Stones playing in between the scenes in front of a crowd. The scenes about the girl having high social statues and money relate well with the lyrics, and so do the scenes about the girl falling to rock bottom. But when they showed the band playing the song they left many lines uninterpreted, ignoring them in the story line. I think this made it easy for the Rolling Stones to make there interpretation make sense but leaves to many lyrics uninterpreted and gives a bias meaning to the song.