"You're body is a wonderland" John Mayer music video analysis

Act: John Mayer

Track: Your body is a wonderland

Genre: Pop Folk Acoustic Soul

Year: 2002

Relationship between visuals and lyrics: You can clearly see that from the title of this song, it is a track about love and romance. The video portrays this theme very well due to the setting and other features such as the lighting and colour. The video begins with Mayer sitting in a room playing a guitar in front of a girl he may have feelings for. This instantly suggests that this is a romantic song as it is the cliché theme of having two people of the opposite sex in a room together. Furthermore, some of the lyrics featured in the first verse are “we’ve got this room for two”, and this ties in very well with the visuals of the music video because they are two people in a room together. There is also a scene where Mayer is lying on a bed with the girl and as this scene is being shown he sings “something about the way the hair falls in your face” and at this point, it looks as if he is telling her this lyric. This is a clear representation of visuals and lyrics being put together well. However, the video doesn’t just show these two characters together as it is also showing Mayer as an artist and I think that the director has decided to do this because he wanted to introduce John Mayer to the audience and to show them what he was capable of doing as this was his first number 1 hit on his debut album. This is because he wasn’t actually a very well known artist at the time that this song came out.

Performance: This music video features quite a lot of performance from start to finish. The first bit of performance we see is at the beginning where he is playing the actual song in synchronisation with the music. I think that this is very important due to the fact that the song has quite a catchy rhythm to it. This therefore gives the video rhythm. Later on in the video we see some scenes where Mayer is performing on stage at different festivals in front of large crowds of people. Even though this actually has no relevance with the song itself, I think that the director has put it in because he perhaps wanted to show the people watching the video what kind of an artist he is and that he is a true performer. We also see some scenes where it looks like he is writing songs and this also gives the audience an idea of how much effort he may put into his profession.

Male gaze: The male gaze in this video isn’t particularly provocative as it is more a story about love and passion and not a story about “getting it on with someone” (I don’t know how else to describe this theme). So therefore it makes for quite a beautiful music video.

Mise en scene: The costume is again like in many other videos of this genre, simple everyday clothing and nothing particularly fancy. This is because I think that the artist doesn’t want to come across as somebody superior or posh just because he is a high selling musician. The main prop in this video is the guitar he is playing at the very beginning of the video and that particular guitar gives off a very love like kind of atmosphere due to the shine on it and the fact that it looks completely brand new.

Shots: The majority of the shots in the video are close ups to the faces of the characters to enhance the romantic theme of the song. There are also close ups to the playing technique Mayer uses on the guitar in order to perhaps show off his skills as a musician. There are also establishing shots of the stages that Mayer performs.