RESEARCH | Initial Ideas

Domestic Violence -  Dave's 'PSYCHODRAMA' 

-album features a song called 'Lesley' - the song is him telling the tale of a woman called Lesley who he befriends on the train; she is trapped in an abusive relationship, carrying her abusers child. 

-Dave said that "the story is more than just a song, and is a message to a woman with a toxic man/ I'm begging you to get support if you're lost or trapped".  

-Dave also told The Observer that the song is a tale about "someone suffering a complete loss of character by being with someone that isn't good for them".  

-Dave's purpose for recounting her harrowing ordeal in is to let other women know that they do not have to tolerate such treatment from men, despite the fact that said individuals will try to “twist” things around to make it seem like it’s their own faults that they are being abused.

NOTEABLE LYRICS -  "she used to be the life of the party for true, and now she's going out hardly ever, her man got her in the yard forever, and her friends wanna help but it's so hard to tell her, hard to let her know that her , Man's possessive and aggressive" 

Rapman's 'Promise'  -    Rapman was inspired to tackle the topic after a friend escaped an abusive relationship, the song tells a story of a young pregnant woman who is killed by her boyfriend.

- Rapman teamed up with Comic Relief for the song in an effort to shine a light on the thousands of women who experience domestic violence across the UK. - He told the Press Association: “I want someone who is in that situation to realise they could end up dead or lose their child.” Almost one in three women will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, and 2 women every week are killed by a partner or ex-partner in England and Wales. Comic Relief has been supporting women and young people experiencing domestic and sexual abuse for over 20 years. Since Comic Relief began, it has supported over 400 projects, who have helped over 900,000 people experiencing domestic violence in the UK, both through their funded projects and via their support to the National Domestic Violence Helpline run in partnership between Refuge and Women’s Aid.

- Rapman said that one woman had contacted him revealing she was trying to escape her relationship after listening to the track.  Rapman said he had struggled to understand why people stayed in abusive relationships until he was invited to Bede House – an organisation that helps women escape their situations and start to rebuild their lives. He said: “I realised that it’s very psychological and if you don’t have an independent support base away from your relationship you can really feel like you’re stranded and left alone.”

I chose domestic violence/abusive relationships as my initial idea to base my music video on as this is something I have actually experienced personally as a 14/15/16 year old and want to make other people aware of the signs to look out for and how to know if you're being abused within a relationship. I didn't really know too much about mental abuse and the behaviours that come under the title. Since leaving the relationship, I've been able to look back and realise and even help other girls, some even younger than me, see when they are actually being abused.

Everything I wanted - Billie Eilish

Billie said "Pretty much that whole song is about me and Finneas' relationship as siblings. We started writing it because I literally had a dream that I killed myself and nobody cared and all of my best friends and people that I worked with basically came out in public and said, like, 'Oh, we never liked her.' In the dream, the fans didn’t care. The internet shit on me for killing myself, all this stuff, and it really did mess me up."

In the lyrics, Billie sings directly about jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge to take her own life: "So I stepped off the Golden / Nobody cried / Nobody even noticed".

"I tried to scream / But my head was underwater / They called me weak / Like I'm not just somebody's daughter".

"The message behind the song is like… my brother is my best friend, and I have these dreams and these things happen, and no matter what happens, he’s gonna always be there for me and it’s the same the other way around."

From this initial research, it has formalised my decision of basing me music video on a domestic violence story and I will use some narrative within my video using Rapman's 'Promise' as inspiration. I will also use lyrics from Dave's 'Lesley' as a starting point for illustrating my narrative, embedding a background story link like he used to write the song.