Main Task: Evaluation Question 2

EVALUATION QUESTION 2:

How does your music magazine represent particular social groups?

The magazine I made was made to represent a teenage audience of mainly males but females also, from an age range of 13 – 19. Because of the genre of music of my magazine, it is more likely to appeal to males of that age as my audience research helped me to decide. Because I tried to appeal to this age group, the image I used on my front cover had to suit the genre perfectly to accurately help represent the teenage social group, so that anyone who was walking by could see the magazine and guess what type of magazine it was before reading it.

The artist on my cover is dressed in simple clothes to represent the title, ‘BLENCH’ which is slang term of teenagers, for someone that is muscular. It is a typical convention to use a pose like this, especially for a rap/hip-hop magazine, because of this it helps associate itself with teenagers that I aimed to reach because it greatly hints at the fact the magazine is a rap/hip-hop magazine. It is a common convention of rap magazines to feature artists with famous brand clothes on, such as huge baseball jackets and snapbacks or artists wearing gold jewellery and because these are done quite often in magazines I have decided to challenge it, and go against it in attempt to slightly differentiate my magazine because I believed it was unneeded to create a complete rap music magazine front cover. However I believe the pose and clothing helps present a cover that looks like a rap/hip-hop magazine, so people will notice it even without having to look and read the magazine to know the genre.

An example of a typical rap magazine shown below:

To make it appeal make to the genre and my target audience, the expression on my models is quite stern as well as his pose to help accurately represent the rap subculture as a vast majority of these magazines will use a similar pose to represent the abrasiveness of the genre. The model on my front cover is black which people stereotype to be involved in the rap and hip-hop music genre.

The models on my double page spread are similarly dressed to promote continuity of the magazine. One of them is holding a microphone is primarily what associated with rappers. Their dress style is very casual which applies to the rap genre, but also is similar to the dress style of London residents as teenagers attempt to have ‘swag’ in their clothing, which means having an noticeable appearance about them self. The way that the models are posing shows that they are semi relaxed individuals who are musicians, and because they are in the age group that I’m targeting it can represent the London teenage social group. All my models can be represented in the same way considering that they are all male meaning that they can dress like rap artists/gangsters or dress casually because that is the norm for the male gender, whereas a female would have to dress very seductively and be in a suggestive position to suit the rap/hip-hop genre. An example of this is shown below: