Music Video from the Past: Duran Duran and TLC
Studying a Music Video from the Past
For the Music topic, you study one contemporary music video alongside one music video from an earlier era, plus the artists' official websites. This earlier video is either Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ (1982) or TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ (1995). Your teacher will have chosen one of these two options for your class — check which one you studied before you revise, since the exam only expects detailed knowledge of the option you covered.
In the exam, this earlier video is examined alongside the contemporary music video and the artist websites you studied. Question 3 (20 marks) asks you to analyse either media language or representation in the set products and reach a judgement or conclusion. Question 4 (10 marks) tests media industries, audiences or contexts. No copy of the video is given to you in the exam, so you must memorise its content — the narrative, the visual style, and the details covered below — well enough to describe and analyse it from memory.
The ‘video from the past’ option is either Duran Duran’s ‘Rio’ (1982), a glamorous New Romantic performance video, or TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ (1995), a narrative and conceptual video about drugs and HIV/AIDS. Learn the one your class studied in depth.
Duran Duran, ‘Rio’ (1982)
‘Rio’ was the title track from Duran Duran’s second album, released in 1982 at the height of the New Romantic movement. New Romantic bands cultivated an image of wealth, glamour and escapism, standing apart from the punk and post-punk sounds that had dominated the previous years. Duran Duran, alongside acts like Spandau Ballet, became one of the most visible bands associated with this style.
The video was directed by Russell Mulcahy, a film-maker known for his highly polished, cinematic pop videos in the early MTV era. It was shot largely aboard a yacht in the turquoise waters around Antigua, with the band dressed in bright pastel suits. This combination of luxury setting and stylised fashion constructs an aspirational, escapist star image for the band, encoding meanings of glamour, wealth and desirability rather than everyday realism.
The visual style of the video closely echoes the airbrushed, stylised illustration on the Rio album cover, created by the artist Patrick Nagel. Both the cover art and the video use bold colour, glossy surfaces and idealised, decorative female figures, showing how media language can move between different media forms — the album artwork and the moving image — to build one consistent commercial identity for the band.
Early MTV, launched in the United States in 1981, relied on a constant supply of visually striking videos to fill its schedule, and glamorous, cinematic videos like ‘Rio’ were well suited to this new platform. The video’s polished visuals and exotic setting helped Duran Duran stand out from more low-budget performance videos and supported their marketing as an aspirational, internationally successful pop act.
Representation in ‘Rio’ reflects its era: the video’s glamorous, aspirational imagery and Nagel-influenced, idealised female figures are typical of early-1980s pop video conventions, and comparing this with more recent representations of gender is a useful way of showing how conventions and values change over time.
TLC, ‘Waterfalls’ (1995)
TLC were an all-girl R&B/hip-hop group made up of Tionne ‘T-Boz’ Watkins, Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes and Rozonda ‘Chilli’ Thomas. ‘Waterfalls’ came from their second album, CrazySexyCool (1994), reached number one in many countries, and is considered one of the group’s signature tracks. TLC combined the smooth sound of R&B with the tougher approach of hip-hop, and were known in the press for a ‘tomboy’ image and for being open about personal struggles, giving them a grittier reputation than many other girl groups of the era. Lopes died in a car accident in 2002; the group has continued to record and tour as a duo.
The ‘Waterfalls’ video blends three music video genres: performance, narrative and conceptual. Intercut with shots of the band performing and dancing in sync are two separate narrative strands that dramatise the song’s lyrics. In the first, a young man dies during a drug deal despite his mother’s fears for him. In the second, an adult man contracts HIV, which develops into AIDS, after unprotected sex.
‘Waterfalls’ tells two tragic narratives: a young man who dies during a drug deal, and a man who contracts HIV/AIDS after unprotected sex. Both stories directly illustrate the song’s lyrics.
The video uses striking special effects: the members of TLC first appear as liquid, water-based versions of themselves, an intertextual reference to the liquid-metal T-1000 character in Terminator 2. Flying montages of natural and urban landscapes bookend each section, and CGI is used to show the mother and son as ghostly figures and to depict the physical symptoms of the man’s illness.
Meanings are often built through symbolism rather than direct depiction: neither the drug deal nor the HIV diagnosis is shown explicitly. Instead, drugs are represented by a plain brown paper bag, and the progress of AIDS is shown through skin deterioration and a montage of photographs of the woman’s previous boyfriends. The mise-en-scène shifts between the two stories: baggy tracksuits and inner-city streets connote a dangerous ‘ghetto’ setting in the drugs narrative, while silk stockings and tangled sheets create a romantic mood in the HIV narrative that swiftly turns horrific.
This combination of gritty subject matter and magical, CGI-driven visuals makes the video feel closer to expressionism than to straightforward social realism. The disease is shown almost as a curse rather than a medical condition, which shifts the tone of the song from documentary-style reporting towards something more symbolic and emotional.
Age is represented in a fairly stereotypical way: the young man is impulsive and well-meaning, ignoring the warnings of his mother, who is shown as wiser and more cautious. His parting ‘call me’ hand gesture as he leaves shows he still cares for her, encouraging sympathy rather than judgement.
TLC’s own representation blends feminine and masculine codes. Their make-up, colourful costumes and cropped tops follow conventionally feminine codes, but their loose, combat-style trousers cover their legs — a deliberate contrast to many R&B and hip-hop videos of the period, which frequently focused on women’s legs. This constructs a more complex, hybrid gender representation than many girl groups of the time.
Social issues are represented sympathetically rather than judgementally. TLC said they wanted to send their message “without preaching”, and the video reflects this: the young man is a victim rather than a stereotypical criminal, and close-ups of the ill man invite empathy rather than condemnation.
In the mid-1990s, HIV/AIDS and drug-related gang violence were both subjects of intense media and public concern. ‘Waterfalls’ engages directly with both issues through sympathetic, tragic stories rather than glamorising crime, which was common in some hip-hop videos of the period.
TLC were the second-biggest-selling girl group of the 1990s after the Spice Girls, and shared a similar message of female solidarity. ‘Waterfalls’ can be seen as part of a ‘socially aware’ strand of hip-hop that tackled real issues like poverty and violence with sympathy, in contrast to more celebratory ‘gangsta rap’ acts of the same decade.
Both videos show how music videos from the past used media language to build a particular version of reality for their audience — whether that is the escapist glamour encoded in ‘Rio’ or the sympathetic, symbolic realism encoded in ‘Waterfalls’. Comparing either video with the contemporary videos you study helps you see how the conventions of music video, and the representations they construct, have changed over time.