Genre Visual Essay

Genre is a critical tool that helps us study texts and audience responses to texts by dividing them into categories based on common elements (codes and conventions, iconography). Genre also allows audiences to make choices about what products they want to consume through acceptance in order to fulfill a particular pleasure.

Jason Mittell Cultural Categories 

Argues that genres are cultural categories that surpass the boundaries of media texts and operate with the industry, audience and cultural practices as well. Industries use genre to sell products to audiences. Genre is a massive part of the selling of the artists songs, the genre has to fit in with the audience’s needs and cultural practices. In Fifth Harmony’s ‘Worth it’ and ‘BO$$’ videos them and the producer take into massive consideration what the audience will want to see and gain from the videos, culture is a large part in the music industry and with group band artist such as Fifth Harmony they need to watch out and be able to apply their music in a wide cultural way, the genre massively helps with cultural portrait.

Steve Neale Dynamic Genre 

Fifth Harmony are a pop girl band, this genre has a variety of artists that can fit underneath its umbrella, pop has changed drastically over the years and has become a wide and vast genre that many artists use as their title. Other artists that fit under this genre consist of; Justin Beiber, Taylor Swift, Megan Trainor,Katy Perry and Beyonce. Generic characteristics across all texts share similar elements depending on the medium. Typical conventions of the pop genre are the artists are predominantly clothed in fashionable, mainstream clothing that will appeal to the mass audiences eye. In the music videos the artist will generally be happy and content with life, and will express the unity between them and teenagers, which is the main audience for this genre. Bold, bright colours are normally associated with pop music videos to create a positive vibe and atmosphere for the audience. A main convention of the pop genre is that most artists all follow a particular rhythm and pattern, it is unusual for the audience to hear a pop song that is dramatically different from the last pop song released. 

Rick Altman
Argues that genre offers audiences 'a set of pleasures', these consist of emotional pleasures which are offered to audiences, genre films are particularly significant when they generate a strong audience response. Visceral Pleasures mean the internal organs and finally Intellectual Pleasures are trying to unravel a mystery or puzzle, pleasure is derived from deciphering a plot and forecasting. The emotional pleasures from the Fifth Harmony 'Worth it' music video are there to make the audience feel happy and good about themselves, when this emotional pleasure is satisfied the internal pleasure of the audience then becomes prominent as it makes them feel happy and enlightened on the inside. 

Nicholas Abercombie

He suggests the "the boundaries between genre are shifting and becoming more permeable". This means that genres are becoming less fixed, and are starting to combine different genres, creating newer styles. He also suggests that the generic classification of certain texts may be uncertain or subject to dispute due to hybrid genres. Genres (and the relationships between them) change over time; the conventions of each genre shift, new genres and sub-genres emerge and others are 'discontinued'. He adds that 'genres permit the creation and maintenance of a loyal audience which becomes used to seeing programmes within a genre'. Nicholas Abercrombie suggests that 'part of the pleasure is knowing what the genre rules are, knowing that the programme has to solve problems in the genre framework, and wondering how it is going to do so'. He adds that audiences derive pleasure from the way in which their expectations are finally realised.'Worth it' has the genre of Pop and R&B. This genre has origins from blues and rhythms. Therefore Fifth Harmony's genre is hybrid, bringing elements from various genres whilst having a base genre of Pop. 

Davis Buckingham

He studied children's and young people's interactions with electronic media. he argues that genre is not simply given by the culture; rather it is a constant process of negotiated and change. ''Worth it' both conform and disagrees with this argument as firstly, today's culture and society has had a large impact on the adaption of the Pop genre including Kid Inks unique style in featuring R&B within the Fifth Harmony's song. This song therefore agrees that genre does constantly change, but also suggests that culture has impact on those changes.