Genre case study - Alt J - Breezeblocks

By Matthew Doswell

Alt-J are an English indie rock band who were formed in 2007, they have four members - Joe Newman, Gus Unger-Hamilton, Thom Green and Gwil Sainsbury.

Breezeblocks is the fourth song on the album 'An Awesome wave'. This song was released on the 18th of May in 2012, the song reached over 77 million views on YouTube and is the most well known Alt J song.

The music video was directed by Ellis Bahl and stars actors Johnathan Dwyer, Jessica DiGiovanni, and Eleanor Pienta. This was the bands first official music video and to this day is the most renowned one they have released. The Video won a UK music video award for "Best Alternative Video" on the 8th of November in 2012.

The video begins by presenting the male character as an evil and dangerous character. However, due to the reverse narrative as the video continues we learn the female character who is originally viewed as a femme fatale, but as the video continues it begins to challenge this gender stereotype and she is then shown as this ‘psychopathic’ character.

Intertextual ReferenceJohn Hartley suggests that “we need to understand genre as a property of the relations between text” in other words genre can’t be without intertextuality, linking to Katie Wales who similarly said “Genre is an intertextual concept” these intertextual are often used to create meaning for the audiences and reference things in similar genres to relate specifically to their audiences. One example of this is in Kill Bill Vol.2 Tarantino uses the same soundtrack as that in The Good The Bad and The Ugly. This is done to create related understanding between the two films, within different pieces of work. The narrative within breezeblocks is backwards, this references the famous film Memento. They both pose these reverse narratives and disorientate the audience. Each has similarity in plot as well, in Breezeblocks the male character is fighting the woman who captured his wife, whereas in Memento the protagonist is hunting the man who raped and murdered his wife. The reverse narrative within breezeblocks also references the ways in which the character has been disorientated, like within Memento where the protagonist has a rare form of memory loss, so this reverse narrative puts the audience within this confused position , aligning them with the protagonists from both Breezeblocks and Memento.

Intertextual Reference

Another reference to Breezeblocks is this quote by James Baldwin who said “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war”. This quote perfectly sums up the music video for the music video Breezeblocks, it takes more of a literal sense to this meaning due to the woman who is killed seems to be seeking revenge on this man, the images below show this. The knife represents the battle whereas, the ring on his finger shows the love and in this case shows the distance he is willing to go for love, linking strongly to this quote