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 RNR magazine cover is centred around the Irish singer Christy Moore. He is perceived as a calm and collected, wise older man and we know this because of his facial features (his small smile, his squinted eyes, and his wrinkles) and how his eye line is looking straight down the lens. The brown soothing background has been paired perfectly to go alongside the white text and the image of Christy Moore. This pulled quote "These days it's yoga, camomile tea and three Our Fathers" represents the mood of the magazine and similar extracts you will read inside the magazine. This particular magazine cover is very spaced out, so you can read everything clearly without it being overlapped. The most important text boxes are written in bold and been made huge so they are the easiest to read, and all the textboxes have the font Sans Serif, because this magazine is taken seriously.
On the other hand MOJO magazine is taking a different approach and the main artist in this magazine is the main member of the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl. He is a big bombastic man who loves rock music.
