Shutdown is the most recent single to date from the grime artist Skepta, released on April 26th 2015.
The first shot in Shutdown is the a long-establishing shot of a block of flats in where we presume to be London, as Skepta is from London which he backs up in various songs. After establishing these flats, Skepta give the audience more knowledge of the location by making the following shot a mid shot of some bridges connecting the flats, this makes the audience feel more involved to the storyline of the music video and gives them a sense of collective ownership. Stuart Hall's audience reception theory states that audiences understand text according to their cultral upbringing. In this case the audience that are from the council estates/flats will understand the text because thats where they have been brought up.
We then see another mid shot this time involving a group a people, some are recognisable, with the likes of JME, Shorty and James McCabe making an appearance, who are all in the Grime group BBK or Boy Better Know. Again this shot is used to engage the audience because they will recognise some of their favourite artists and feel comfortable watching the video right from the outset. A few similar establishing shots later, we see Skepta driving an all white Mercedes 4x4. The fact that the Mercedes is all white does make a stark contrast from the normal colour scheme in the Grime genre, which is black. White represents the opposite of black as it is associated with death, evil and mystery, where as white connotes goodness, purity and perfection, and Skepta is also dressed in white for the first half of this music video. Claude Levi-Strauss' Binary Oppositions states that all narratives are organised around the conflict between such binary opposites. In this case the binary opposites are the black of the rest of his crew and the grime genre as a whole, and the fact that Skepta is wearing white is the binary opposition.
After the shot of the white Mercedes, there is a mid shot where Skepta is in front of his peers rapping whilst they stand in the background. This is as so because he is the most prominent figure in the music video, being that he is the artist and producer. The shots that follows this first 'dominant' shot all try to represent Skepta in the same way, by making sure to have him on a higher level than the rest of the people in the video. He can be seen sat on a wall whilst his peers are below or just even standing up, as he is taller than the rest of his posse. This complies to the social dominance theory, in particular group hierarchy, which has been around since the dawn of time and helped man to survive in groups. There has to be social dominant is order for a hierarchy to work and in this video Skepta is dominant.
The following shot is of a woman, on her own wearing a grey coat and necklace with blonde hair, the camera starts at a mid - long range then zooms into the woman face. This accentuates the woman's blonde hair and her facial features, which familiarises her with the audience. The woman is alone because she is being objectified by the camera operator, who we can assume is male, as is Skepta who produced the video. This aligns with Laura Mulvey's male gaze theory, which states that woman are objectified in film because heterosexual men are in control of the camera, in our case Skepta. However, the shot does not fully conform to this theory because it objectifies her face, which is far from he norm of focusing on erotic parts of the female body, breasts, curves etc. This is backed up in the following shot including a different girl who is wearing big clothing that covering up her body, which then, again, zooms into her face which is just staring into the camera. There is no erotic features in the shot which may say that Skepta isn't trying to objectify women in a sexual way but rather in a way that shows they are just the same as men and we are all equal. However, there is the question of why these women are on their own in these shots, but this is probably because Skepta knows that his audience will be wanting to see female in an unrestricted way which means they can see the whole of them, because grime videos before have done the same thing, so he conforms in this way.
The shot after this is a shot of a what we can safely assume is a male handling drugs of some kind (white powder). Skepta had a background before rap which involved selling drugs, which he has repeatedly mentioned in previous songs, such as Ace Hood Flow in which he says 'never got money...off white' white being cocaine. This shot is probably paying homage to his former criminal career. The other reason he has included this shot is because again, worryingly, it may conform to Stuart Hall's audience reception theory because they may have come in contact with the drug trade, and this trade is a convention of the grime genre so makes sense to include, even if it does give the audience an idea of his criminal background.
A few shots later there is a shot where two men are sat on a wall, one dressed in all black and one dressed fully in white. Again, this shot re-enforces Claude Levi-Strauss' binary opposition theory as these men could not be more opposite, a good example being black and white. Levi-Strauss said that binary opposites are included in film because they catch the audiences attention for long periods of time as the battle between these opposites reigns on.
Halfway through the video the song pays homage to Kanye West's performance of All Day at the Brit Awards by including a voice recording of a complaint received by ITV. This complaint goes on to say about young men all dressed in black not normally being on primetime television, which speaks volumes about the impact of these grime artists that are gaining popularity at an alarming rate. This complaint also outlines the conventions of grime, as they are all dressed in black. The corresponding shots to the complaint are as you would expect, young men all dressed in black running up a staircase. It is at this point Skepta changes his outfit to all black, to represent his change in attitude and how he was angered by this famous complaint and the binary opposition is thrown out of the window as all his peers are dressed in black.
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