The Specials - Ghost Town

 The Specials - Ghost Town: Blog tasks

Background and historical contexts

Read this excellent analysis from The Conversation website of the impact Ghost Town had both musically and visually. Answer the following questions

1) Why does the writer link the song to cinematic soundtracks and music hall tradition?

-Written in E♭, more attuned to “mood music”, with nods to cinematic soundtracks and music hall tradition, it reflects and engenders anxiety.

2) What subcultures did 2 Tone emerge from in the late 1970s?

-2 Tone had emerged stylistically from the Mod and Punk subcultures and its musical roots and the people in it, audiences and bands, were both black and white. 

3) What social contexts are discussed regarding the UK in 1981?

-England was hit by recession and away from rural Skinhead nights, riots were breaking out across its urban areas. Deprived, forgotten, run down and angry, these were places where young people, black and white, erupted. In these neglected parts of London, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool the young, the unemployed, and the disaffected fought pitch battles with the police.

4) Cultural critic Mark Fisher describes the video as ‘eerie’. What do you think is 'eerie' about the Ghost Town video?

-The narrative portrayed and instruments played.

5) Look at the final section (‘Not a dance track’). What does the writer suggest might be the meanings created in the video? Do you agree?

-"It’s just a cry out against injustice, against closed off opportunities by those who have pulled the ladder up and robbed the young, the poor, the white and black of their songs and their dancing, their futures. Drive round an empty city at dawn. Look at the empty flats.  See the streets before the bankers get there and after the cleaning ladies have gone. And put young, poor, disadvantaged people in that car." And I agree with it.

Now read this BBC website feature on the 30th anniversary of Ghost Town’s release. 

1) How does the article describe the song?

-It's blend of melancholy, unease and menace took on an entirely new meaning when Britain's streets erupted into rioting almost three weeks later - the day before Ghost Town reached number one in the charts.

2) What does the article say about the social context of the time – what was happening in Britain in 1981?

-Released on 20 June 1981 against a backdrop of rising unemployment, its blend of melancholy."

3) How did The Specials reflect an increasingly multicultural Britain?

-With a mix of black and white members, The Specials, too, encapsulated Britain's burgeoning multiculturalism. 

4) How can we link Paul Gilroy’s theories to The Specials and Ghost Town?

-"The song and video offers evidence of Gilroy's Black Atlantic diasporic identity theory – that black culture is forged through travel and hybridity, a “liquidity of culture"”.

5) The article discusses how the song sounds like a John Barry composition. Why was John Barry a famous composer and what films did he work on?

-"John Barry was one of the all-time great masters of movie music. His career spanned some 50 years - from Midnight Cowboy and Born Free to Dances with Wolves and Out of Africa - taking in 11 James Bond films along the way."

Ghost Town - Media Factsheet

Watch the video several times before reading Factsheet #211 - Ghost Town. You'll need your GHS Google login to access the factsheet. Once you have analysed the video several times and read the whole factsheet, answer the following questions: 

1) Focus on the Media Language section. What does the factsheet suggest regarding the mise-en-scene in the video? 

-The mise-en-scene of the Ghost Town video uses the style of British social realist films. This genre is characterised by sympathetic representations of working-class men, the highlighting of bleak (often urban) environments and a sense of hopelessness.

2) How does the lighting create intertextual references? What else is notable about the lighting?

-The mise-en-scene of Ghost Town also makes use of a visual style that borrows from expressionist cinema. In the car, the band are lit eerily by a limited interior light source and what looks like a handheld torch to light the faces of those in the back from a low angle. This is a highly effective low budget filmmaking technique suited to the aesthetic.

3) What non-verbal codes help to communicate meanings in the video?

-The singing of the song with expressionless faces and direct mode-of-address with zombie-like, stiff body movements are suddenly relaxed in the manic middle section.

4) What does the factsheet suggest regarding the editing and camerawork? Pick out three key points that are highlighted here.

-Editing is used to control the pace of the video and camerawork distorts our sense of day and night. One scene is cut like an action sequence of a car chase.

-The band are generally shot as a group, emphasising the relationship between them. Most of the shots are on-board travelling shots.

-The sequence near the start consists of a series of establishing shots and low angle shots which make the scenery loom in an intimidating way.

5) What narrative theories can be applied to the video? Give details from the video for each one.

-"It is also narrative in that it has a simple premise that the group are looking for somewhere to go out but are thwarted and end up throwing stones into the river. There is a secure concept  to the video, which is the journey and the eeriness of the location, the zombie-like appearance of the band."

6) How can we apply genre theory to the video?

-"Ghost Town is an example of how music videos often borrow from different cultural reference points. As discussed, the visual aesthetic for Ghost Town draws strongly on two cinematic influences - expressionist cinema of the 1920s and the social realist mode of film-making that began in the 1960s."

7) Now look at the Representations section. What are the different people, places and groups that are represented in the Ghost Town video? Look for the list on page 4 of the factsheet.

-‘Thatcher’s Britain’

-The City

-Urban youth

-Race

-Masculinity

8) How can Gauntlett's work on collective identity be applied to the video?

-"Gauntlett suggests that media texts may offer us a sense of collective identity, by being an audience member and finding things in common with others via our shared tastes."

9) How can gender theorists such as Judith Butler be applied to Ghost Town?

-Butler suggests that these "musicians seem to be ‘performing’ the structures of patriarchy which include brotherhood, camaraderie and male solidarity. Butler also argued that unless the media could also begin to transgress, (or cross) boundaries in the way it represented gender, it is difficult for society also to lessen its reliance on gender stereotypes."

10) Postcolonial theorists like Paul Gilroy can help us to understand the meanings in the Ghost Town music video. What does the factsheet suggest regarding this?

-"The video challenges the notion of in-groups and out-groups by mixing ethnicities and focusing more on social class and the bonding potential of music."