The Specials - Ghost Town: Blog tasks

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

The Specials and other Two-Tone bands were very popular and had a fandom that

identified with the politics, the music and the fashion.

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. “Ghost Town” was the mournful sound of these riots, a poetic protest. 

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

The setting in ghost town has an eerie feeling as well as the lighting and lyrics.

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.

1) How does the article describe the song?

The article states that a few songs evoke their era like the Specials' classic Ghost Town, a depiction of social breakdown that provided the soundtrack to an explosion of civil unrest.

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, 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.

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. The band's 2 Tone record label gave its name to a genre which fused ska, reggae and new wave and, in turn, inspired a crisply attired youth movement.

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

Gilroy describes a 'myth of black criminality' and attributed statistical differences in recorded criminality between ethnic groups as being due to police stereotyping and racist labelling and ghost town focused on the inequality and unfairness happening.

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 a Middle Eastern musician that had a solid reggae undertone and produced stuff that sounds like nothing else.

Ghost Town - Media Factsheet

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 characterized 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?

There is cutting between day and night, dark and light, which is disorienting for the audience and plays with timeframe to make the ‘ghost town’ feel as menacing by day as night. The

Expressionist style featuring shadows, chiaroscuro lighting (sharp contrast between dark and light) contributes to this.

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. Both its style and short shot duration give a frenetic feel. This is reinforced by handheld, disorienting camerawork with whip pans and canted angles.

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

To apply Todorov’s theory to the video, we need to reflect on the narrative of the lyrics as well as the visual content of the video.

The performer or band appear in the video performing it in some way – this could be a

literal performance or just one band member lip-synching.

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

Neale’s approach to theorizing genre tells us that genres hybridize. 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. The musical genre of ska had strong links to the 1960s, when it became popular in the UK with the mod sub-culture. Two-tone culture had diverse influences as reggae, ska, and punk / new wave.

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. In this sense the song and video nurture a sense of male collective identity and shares the experience of trying to negotiate identity. This means that the text offers a place for men to see their problems being enacted and perhaps compare them with their own lives in

what was a time of economic deprivation for many when many traditionally masculine jobs were disappearing.

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

Judith Butler is a useful theorist to explore in relation to this text. Butler suggested that gender was not defined by the sex we are born with, but is a collection of behaviors by members of a

biological sex often based on attitudes and expectations held by society. She referred to these as a ‘performance’. These musicians seem to be ‘performing’ the structures of patriarchy which include brotherhood, camaraderie and male solidarity. 

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?

Post-colonialists might argue that there is double consciousness (Gilroy) here. Black musicians, as part of a music industry in the UK, which was controlled by the white majority, had limited control in terms of self-representation and were often side-lined in bands which were multi-ethnic.