MUSIC MAGAZINES: MEDIA LANGUAGE

Look carefully at the front covers of MOJO and RNR magazines. 

QUESTION: How far do MOJO and RNR use different media language to create different connotations? (CONNOTATION meaning: an idea or quality that a word makes you think about in addition to its meaning.)

Answer on your blog. This is a high-value question and should take all lesson to answer. You can use the class blog search engine for more examples of how to analyse music magazines.

In your answer you should have 2 paragraphs:

• analyse the media language in MOJO and RNR magazine. 'Media language' includes the placement of the main image, the type of photography, lighting, colours, fonts, how busy or restrained the cover is, the layout (such as alignment to the margins), how serious or playful 
• make judgements and draw conclusions about how far the media language is used differently in both extracts to create different connotations. Are there similarities in both covers? What sorts of audiences are they targeting? You could think about MOJO's rock aesthetic of living loud and dangerously compared to RNR's folk, rock, blues vibe. 
• MOJOs choice of colours is vibrant, electric and dynamic, particularly in the primary colours of the covermount with its playful skeleton. By contrast, RnR uses soft, dull, browns and only red as an accent colour
• Foo Fighters
• pull quotes 'we've been to funerals, we've been to jail' shows the struggles that the Foo Fighters have faced.
• This represents the stereotypical lifestyle of a Rockstar
• colours are playful and language is dark
• Christy Moore
• although both magazines conform to genre conventions and feature a star in the centre of visual interest and celebrates them, MOJO does so in a more dynamic, aggressive, confrontational way compared to RnR's gentle, low-key, folksy vibe. This is because MOJO targets a primarily male rock audience whilst RnR is aimed at folk and blues.
• MOJO has a more busy cluttered cover due to cover lines, images, puffs as well as a very dynamic cover mount in neon colours with a vibrant cartoon image 
• RnR has many cover lines too, but they are more minimalistic and justified to the RH margin. They are all in white creating a calm, orderly, uncluttered, organised quality. Equally, the cover mound with its modest verbal play unheard, it is very plain and streamlined. 
• Although both music magazines feature many articles which is typical for music magazines, RnR is more orderly and restrained.

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