Riptide by Vance Joy

The indie music genre is music that is produced independently from commercial record labels. They generally include vocals with acoustics. Recently, ukulele has come into popular use within the genre. Big influencers of the genre are indie movie directors Wes Anderson and David Lynch. For example, the cutbacks to the woman singing every chorus and slowly getting more beat up are probably less a commentary on violence against women, though it could be interpreted that way, and more a reference to Lynch's Blue Velvet. Well known artists of the indie genre would be Coldplay.

The imagery in the video is very literal for each individual line. For example, during the chorus, "lady running" is matched with a video of a woman running and then "down to the riptide" it shows a video of the riptide. The entire music video seems to follow this pattern, treating every line like its own story rather than presenting a continuous narrative. The closest the video gets to openly presenting a narrative is in the second verse, which is entirely dedicated to the story of a movie he has recently watched. It is interesting when focusing on the lyrics how conversational it is. It is as if it is a letter or is being told to another person verbally.

The video also uses a lot of imagery of women being victimised. There are multiple shots of women being dragged off by some unknown beings or running away. Most shots of women are from behind, and they are seemingly unaware that they are being watched. While the shots of women running are not at a high speed and seem to be casual, it still feels uncomfortable as we are never given any context for what is happening. There is also once again the woman in the chorus which, while I have already stated what it probably means, could still be seen as yet another disturbing presentation of women as victims.

There are odd specific memes sprinkled throughout. For example, in the shot of a bag being packed, it is shown that the person has a Romanian passport. This is one of the only notable clues as to who the narrator is and where he is from.

In this video, women are objectified, viewed only as victims or sex object.