Contemporary Music Videos: Stormzy and Justin Bieber
Two Contemporary Artists, One Exam Question
For this part of the course your class studies one option pair set by your teacher: one contemporary music video and its online media, together with one music video from the 1980s or 1990s. The contemporary options include Lizzo's Good as Hell, Taylor Swift's The Man, Stormzy's Superheroes (2020) and Justin Bieber's Intentions (2020). This lesson focuses on Superheroes, with notes on Intentions. Your teacher will have chosen one option from this second pairing for your class to study in detail. Whichever video you studied, you need to know its specific facts, images and figures — not just general theory.
Both videos are studied using the same theoretical framework as every other product: media language, representation, media industries and audiences. Two ideas matter especially here. Intertextuality describes how a video’s images can reference other films or shows. Connotation describes the extra meaning carried by colours, objects and costumes beyond what they simply show.
Superheroes: The Story, the Look, the Sound
Stormzy released Superheroes on 13 December 2019 as a track on his second album, Heavy Is the Head. The video itself came later: it was directed by British filmmaker Taz Tron Delix and produced by 2veinte, an animation studio based in Buenos Aires. Stormzy dedicated the finished video to actor Chadwick Boseman, who died in August 2020, and the video closes with the tribute “RIP Chadwick Boseman 1976–2020, Forever a Superhero in our hearts.”
Superheroes premiered on 9 September 2020, streamed live into school classrooms in London, Glasgow, Dublin and Manchester as pupils returned after Covid-19 closures. The video is dedicated to Chadwick Boseman.
The video’s media language builds meaning from its first shot. A wide establishing shot of a UK cityscape is paired with birdsong on the soundtrack, connoting hope. The colour palette continues this mood throughout: a soft pink sky suggests optimism, while gold highlights the bones of Stormzy and the young boy when they turn translucent, reflecting the song’s lyrics about courage and inner strength.
Costume and iconography reinforce the same ideas. Stormzy’s black outfit symbolises Black empowerment, and the boy’s Adidas tracksuit was chosen by the director to echo the style of Stormzy’s earlier Sounds of the Skeng video, giving the character authenticity for a young audience. Unusually for a music video, Superheroes never shows Stormzy performing the song — it is entirely narrative, following the boy on a hero’s journey in which Stormzy and other figures help him discover his own power. A low angle shot the first time the boy meets Stormzy positions the audience to view him as an inspirational role model, and lighting effects such as lightning and starlight connote power whenever a character’s abilities appear.
Because the video is animated, its imagery can reference other well-known media texts. When Stormzy flies with the boy, the scene recalls Buzz Lightyear carrying Woody in Pixar’s Toy Story. Later, when a character solves maths problems using apparent telekinesis over pens in a classroom, the shot recalls Neo’s powers in The Matrix. Recognising these references adds an extra layer of meaning for audiences already familiar with those texts.
Representation: Role Models, Family and Identity
Stormzy is represented positively throughout as a caring Black role model. He is shown reading Malorie Blackman’s novel Noughts and Crosses and later presents the same book to a police officer, a moment that raises the issue of racial profiling and represents education as a route to empowerment.
Gender representations in the video are mixed. A ‘young Black queen’ is shown chopping vegetables and washing dishes, which reinforces a domestic stereotype but also frames her as a superhero for caring for her grandmother. Elsewhere, a girl anxiously checks her reflection in a mirror before being inspired to embrace her natural beauty by a picture of the artist Little Simz — her gesture codes show this shift from anxiety to confidence. A different girl wears a football shirt with the name Rashford on the back, challenging stereotypes by showing a young Black female as a talented footballer.
The video also represents a range of family structures: one girl lives with and cares for her grandmother, while a father is shown doing his daughter’s hair, challenging stereotypes about Black fatherhood and masculinity. The events of the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement appear directly, through a graffiti shot and a protest scene in which characters hold placards and wear face masks — a detail that also reflects the Covid-19 pandemic.
Superheroes builds varied representations of Black British identity: the Rashford shirt challenges football stereotypes, the father doing his daughter’s hair challenges stereotypes about fatherhood, and the protest scene with placards and face masks reflects the Black Lives Matter movement and the Covid-19 pandemic together.
Contexts: Why 2020 Matters
The video’s Black Lives Matter protest scene reflects the social and political climate of summer 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd in the United States. Stormzy himself took part in the London protests that summer, and the face masks worn by the protesters in the video reflect the Covid-19 pandemic happening at the same time.
The Rashford shirt has its own political context: footballer Marcus Rashford had publicly campaigned against the UK government’s decision to end free school meals during the pandemic, and pressured ministers into reversing it. Stormzy is well known for this kind of political activism himself, using social media and high-profile performances — including his 2019 Glastonbury headline slot — to support or criticise British politicians and encourage young people to vote.
Audiences and Industries: Superheroes
The primary audience for the Superheroes video was school pupils across the UK, who watched it streamed into their classrooms on the first day back after lockdown. Before the video played, Stormzy sent pupils a personal message: “I think it’s important that you guys understand how powerful you are. Despite the colour of your skin, despite where you come from, despite your religion, despite whatever it is that you feel may be holding you back; you are a superhero.”
The video’s target audience — young Black British children, sometimes called Generation Alpha — is noticeably younger than Stormzy’s usual grime fanbase. Some older Gen Z listeners reacted with surprise on social media when they recognised that the song samples Keisha White’s Someday, better known as the theme tune to CBBC’s Tracy Beaker: one fan tweeted, “Man is singing Tracy Beaker riddims on his album?? Give that man a grammy.”
A 2023 YouGov poll ranked Stormzy the fifth most popular rap or hip-hop artist in the UK, and his Instagram following splits roughly 52% male to 48% female. Applying Uses and Gratifications Theory, Superheroes could offer education, entertainment and personal identification for its young audience. Stuart Hall’s Reception Theory would describe the preferred reading of the video as young Black viewers feeling empowered and inspired by Stormzy and the other role models shown.
Stormzy’s industry journey shaped how Superheroes reached its audience. His first album, Gang Signs & Prayer, was released independently and became the first rap album to win the BRIT Award for British Album of the Year. He then signed to Atlantic Records in 2018 for Heavy Is the Head — the fifth best-selling album of 2020 — before signing to 0207 Def Jam, a new UK rap and grime division of Universal Music Group, in 2020. His #Merky brand donated £500,000 to the Black Heart Foundation for scholarships and pledged £10 million over ten years to fight racial inequality in the UK.
Stormzy is closely associated with bringing grime, a sub-genre of hip-hop, into the mainstream. He was the first unsigned artist and the first grime artist to appear on Later… with Jools Holland, won the first ever Best Grime Act award at the 2014 MOBOs, and became the first Black British solo artist to headline Glastonbury, in 2019.
Stormzy signed to Atlantic Records in 2018 and to 0207 Def Jam, part of Universal Music Group, in 2020 — after releasing his debut album independently.
The Superheroes video itself was made quickly: 2veinte and director Taz Tron Delix produced it in just eight weeks, which meant using simple backgrounds after the opening establishing shots so they could focus their limited time on animating the characters.
If your class studied Justin Bieber’s Intentions (2020) instead, remember it as a very different kind of video. It features rapper Quavo and was filmed at the Alexandria House shelter in Los Angeles, using real women and families who lived there rather than actors. The video is linked to a charitable message supporting the shelter. Because the detailed factsheet facts in this lesson are drawn from Superheroes, check your teacher’s notes for the specific dates, production details and figures relating to Intentions before your exam.
Whichever video you studied, remember that you must also know the artist's official website and the social and participatory media connected to it — these show how the video’s meanings extend into online, converged media.