Textual Analysis: Goldie - Inner City Life

Goldie - Inner City Life

Analysis

Inner city life has a main theme of portaying how life is for people who live in the inner city, giving the audience a point of view of how poverty effects residents and how they may deal with it for example in the video there is a mom who has children but has many problems such as not being able to pay bills, consequently leading her into prostituiton to pay them as scenes where the camera is in a bird eye view position and we see the woman with a man in a bed but are not really intimate or close which may suggest that this is what has happened.

An establishing shot is used to help introduce the setting for the video, what we see is an urban area which can be said to be in poverty e.g. council flats, in addition the setting which is shown is in black and white thus adding to the effect of poverty. The mise-en-scene which is shown signifies many things such as the shots of the BMW's on a rough state which stereotypically has negative connotations of how the person may have bought it, for instance drug dealing highlighting who may have power in the area.

The messages which are evident in the text are that everyone has problems have thier own way of dealing with them such as playing sports or going to clubs; giving them a escapsism of reality allowing them to keep their problems to one side.
Marxists would argue that these are realisitic messages of how life is in the urban area as the lyrics and images suggest serious matters i.e. the lyrics "i long to be free" highlights the fact that life is not pleasant for these people and they long for something different.

This text challenges the hegemonic control as it gives a different prespective of how inner city life is represented; it depitcs key problems of poverty and allows the audience to interpret them in their own way, its giving the audience to see the problems which exist and they need to be solved.

The taget audience for this text is mainsteamers as it relates to them, therefore giving an adding meaning to it as they can see themsevles in their 'shoes'; it provides them with a familiar feeling to it as they can relate to it.