hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to brown skinned girl by Beyonce as a music video this video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying OCR gcsc media studies as it appears as a set text on that specification from 2025 onwards the music video opens with quite an urban setting with lots of Autumn Leaves um and you get this very high fashion outfit which seems completely out of keeping with the location and the setting you get a woman and a young girl playing kind of P Cake uh in a very luxury setting looking very very stylish so immediately we're seeing lots of images of luxury um High fashion and that kind of sets the tone for the video there's a graphic match or an action match as well to Beyonce and her daughter um doing the same thing on a kind of dock by the water in the outdoors and that location is much more natural and Wild and Free and perhaps presenting Beyonce as being very natural the camera style here is very handheld it's quite shaky at times it feels a little bit like home video and that adds an element of realism to an audience it makes it feel like what we're seeing is real and not kind of super Studio filmed stylized shots we see a variety of black girls clapping smiling very happy in this very Lush Garden um and that adds this kind of element of positivity and is immediately giving us this idea of diversity don't forget black women in particular often under represented with in the media and so including a variety of black women in a music video helps to kind of add to that representation and Mak something feel very diverse and enriched in terms of race a lot of the images here seem to not be related at all it's kind of a a weird Montage so now we go to images of a girl in an apartment Block in slow motion it seems quite sad um and we track in towards this uh baby um and then we go back to a garden with a a stage in it and a girl stood in front um and then there's lots of dancing in Bull gowns so the images seem to be cut together in quite a kind of odd Montage like way um there's no kind of uh nice linear narrative through this video and it means that the images being cut together in this kind of nonlinear seemingly unrelated Montage encourages the audience to interpret them themselves and and come up with their own meanings for them the dancers in the ball gowns again conting wealth luxury status some of them are frozen on this dance floor um and the lights go down and the tone changes um you know they're wearing gloves it's very much this idea of femininity and status and class but again lots of enigma codes why are these girls Frozen what are they doing there why are they in ball gowns what kind of party is this and all these Enigma codes they're not really answered in this video so again encouraging audiences to interpret these these things in the way that they want to we get this kind of bingy opposition contrast here with a much poorer looking girl walking through her dress is much more faded it's far less luxurious than the others um and she kind of stares at these Frozen people it's very clear that she's not part of their world so very much represented in opposition to them so we're getting kind of class and Status represented here the luxurious and the wealthy versus the much poorer uh working class we see a bird's eyee view shot here and the shadow looks like a clock um and at the same time we're hearing a lyrics that say um that work uh and time is a grind um and so I suppose this idea that working and having to go to a job every day and earn money is is hard and it takes up a huge amount of your time um and again perhaps that's relating to class and working class having to work very hard for their lives we have another montage here of Beyonce very visual shots family in a garden so Beyonce is in this kind of yellow dress it's very African in style and it kind of celebrating culture and Heritage and Beyonce is kind of known for including some of this culture within her videos so this will be familiar to a lot of her fans we see a range of black people posed in a garden here wearing suits um again conting status and power and wealth um and there's diversity of black people here so for example example you've got people with much paler skin uh much darker skin you've got people wearing head scarves people wearing braids uh people wearing their hair completely natural so um again that's quite inclusive we often don't see um a wide variety of people from black backgrounds represented in the media including these different representations of Blackness makes the video feel quite inclusive we have scenes here that appear to be kind of like a debutant bow um you know lots lot of luxury scenes of dancing uh we've got pearls around people's necks as well beautiful costumes debutant balls are a kind of cultural event which are often associated with upper white classes within America and other countries and so um having a debutant ball here um using um black actresses black models um kind of is unconventional and challenges those ideas about debutants however black debutant balls have actually been quite a big thing ever since the sort of late 1800s obviously there was a lot of segregation in society at the time so there were segregated debutant Bulls unlike traditional kind of White debutant Bulls black debutant Bulls focused not on the eligibility of women for marriage but focused on celebrating their successes in things like the world of education and the world of work so perhaps that's what Beyonce is trying to do in this video by featuring a black debutant bow the girls are dressed in white which if you know anything about things like weddings um christenings Etc often is associated as a sign of kind of Purity and virginity and the men are in suits which connotes again a quite traditional representations of men being quite powerful and having high status so I suppose reasonably traditional gender representations here lots of artistic shots very high fashion it almost seems like kind of um art photography here and fashion photography and again that appeals a lot to Beyonce's audience they've come to know her for including these really exciting kind of costumes hair and makeup within her videos and it potentially targets a more female audience as well and this is where there are um several intertextual references to real celebrities that make Cameo appearances within the video so for example in the lyrics uh Beyonce sings When Naomi walks in um and in Works Naomi Campbell who is an incredibly famous superm model um kind of started her career in the kind of 19 90s and is still one of the most famous super models of all time another lyric says pretty like Lupita uh and in walks Lupita nongo who's a um famous black actress she's won an Oscar you know um incredibly popular at the moment within the kind of media Industries so celebrating um popular and successful black women and another lyrics says when my Kelly's roll in and in comes Kelly Roland uh who is a singer and was certainly very famous in the 1990s and she was part of Destiny's Child which was a band that Beyonce was in so clearly celebrating a range of famous and successful powerful black women the song lyrics do make reference to certain elements of of race and racial experience and discrimination so for example one of the lyrics says U melanin too dark to throw her shade perhaps reflects ideas of colorism this idea that um within uh the society certain shades of dark skin have been more widely accepted than others and if your skin is too dark then there's often been more discrimination faced um and so uh kind of reflecting these ideas of racial discrimination and disparities within different um racial groups and again there are several women introduced here um who are models um adut AET and a um who are um fashion models who many audiences may be familiar with the group shots here of the women with different hair um again Embraces the differences of black hairstyles again you've got braids natural hair um and there's lots of cultural references to African style in terms of things like jewelry the different dresses going on um and the lyrics say there's complexities in complexion so the whole video the theme is clearly about trying to embrace Black Culture um and different elements of Black Culture we see a woman sat on a plastic covered sofa which to me is a kind of reference to the past and also to kind of um certain classes as well in the past it used to be quite popular to have plastic on your furniture to keep it nice um because you couldn't afford to replace the furniture so you'd have plastic on it if you were kind of more working class to keep your furniture looking nice for company that would come over lots of shots of smiling faces and people celebrating together hugging Etc makes this feel like a really positive video and it makes Beyonce seemed like she's super popular and that other people really respect her Beyonce sings about the same skin tone taking over this suggests perhaps themes of empowerment uh Beyonce celebrating the fact that black women now are able to take on positions of power and wealth and status and success within Society she sings remember what mama told you and in this scene we see Beyonce's real mom which again is something familiar for a lot of audiences it kind of acts like a kind of um Easter egg almost for audiences who might recognize her and suggests that um her mom may have been very supportive of her growing up it adds a sense of realism featuring her own family whether it's her mom or her daughters within the video it makes it seem very relatable even though it's obviously very fashionable and stylized it adds this element of familiarity to audiences and makes her seem like a real person we see her daughter Blue Ivy singing um and I suppose this is kind of becoming more common she's taking part in more of Beyonce's videos and tours um and kind of reflects the growing trend for children of celebrities to be becoming famous themselves but it also perhaps um links into the themes within the video about children becoming important and people having to be aware of the impacts on children of things like discrimination the creator of the music video is a lady called Jen niru and she sort of is quoted as saying that she really wanted the video to be about intimacy Sisterhood and celebrations within the video it is not just black women that you are seeing you've got a range of different people from different black backgrounds so for example you've got black African-American black British you've also got Sudanese but you also have Brazilian uh Southeast Asian women Mexican Kenyan women Sudanese Australian and also albino black as well um so um a kind of big range of um ethnic diversity um although some people feel that it was um too focused on black communities and perhaps there should have been more kind of Asian or other mixed backgrounds involved and overall within the video you do have a big celebration of women obviously it's hugely female Centric you've got female models actresses you've got Award winners pioneering black women who have done things that perhaps previous generations of women haven't been able to um and so it is a very big celebration of gender so that was my easy to understand Guide to the Beyonce video if you want to check out my channel there are lots of other videos that are going to be relevant for you and if you have any questions or would like a video that I don't already have leave a little comment below and I'll see what I can do