Textual Analysis of an iconic music video [Beastie Boys - Sabotage]

The 1994 song 'Sabotage' by Beastie Boys was made into a music video as of 2009, parodying American Cop dramas with a cheesy yet high quality production to make fun of what were serious products yet captivate their audience into watching the video.

 4 seconds in and the video opens up with a fish-eye style shot. This helped to reflect the culture of America and the Beastie Boys' persona as this lens type was commonly associated with skateboarding which was extremely popular from the nineties to noughties. Fans of this kind of punk/hip hop/rock were also commonly associated with activities such as skating and so this could also be seen as a reference from the fans of the band as a kind of 'thank you' for the support.



Secondly is the establishing shot with a bold and distinctive title in the typical style of bright colours blending into the orange theme of the background, something you would that you would see on any Americanised Cop drama.
Something very similar is the classic series 'Sledgehammer' - a striking name with bright colours and bold writing, something that we can see Beastie Boys mimicking with their music video.

Here we see the introduction of a character in the music video named 'Cochese'. The particular name could be a reference to the 1979 film 'The Warriors', known and rated highly for it's story line but never seemed to have that good acting, and so we could assume that the film is being parodied in this music video.

Alongside this we can also see the poor costume design used to stereotype police in the 80's but yet again in a parody kind of style. Additionally to this photo we can see the next one down that also shows deliberately bad costume design along with the blatantly obvious mannequin falling off the bridge to make further fun of how low budget stereotypical and patriotic yet successful Cop shows were, something I imagine the Beastie Boys had a lot of fun doing...