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. 

The contrast between the red and blue creates a more vivid and expressive character from the Foo Fighters cover. In addition, words like 'adventures' and 'battle' also present them as more bold and determined from the language - accented also by the posture of the cover figure hunched over the title much like a hunting predator. Also, the sans serif font alongside the more 'adventurous' language connotes that they have struggled - 'we've been to...we've been to...' also highlights this, showing that they are both experienced and unshaped by their 'struggles' - displaying a different kind of but still respectable figure compared to the RnR cover.

One of the magazines is busier than the other. MOJO's cover is quite cluttered and busy, due to its numerous cover lines, images and puffs as well as a very dynamic cover mount in neon colours, with a vibrant cartoon image. RnR also has many cover lines, but they are all more minimalistic, and justified to the right-hand margin. They are exclusively in white, creating calm, orderly, uncluttered quality. Equally, the cover mount has modest verbal play, and is very plain and streamlined.

MOJO's choice of colours is vibrant, electric and dynamic, particularly in the primary colours of the cover mount, with its playful skeleton. By contrast, RnR uses soft, dull browns and only red an accent colour.

Although both magazines conform to genre conventions - both magazines centre a star at the centre of visual interest, and both magazines celebrate that star, but MOJO does so in a more dynamic, aggressive, confrontational way compared to RnR's gentle, lowkey, folksy vibe. This is because MOJO targets a primarily male rock audience, while RnR is aimed at folk and blues audiences. 

Also, although both music magazines feature many articles, RnR is more orderly and restrained.

•