Music Magazines

 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. 

In MOJO, you can see that it is a very chaotic magazine cover, with lots of text all over the place, and a man in a very aggressive way, with his arms out and showing his teeth. However, in RNR it is all very organized, with the man on the cover in a very comforting and warming position, like he is trying to invite you into the cover. On MOJO you have lots of very bright colours that make it stand out and really pop, like red, white, blue and green. All of these colours contrast, and compliment the eyes, as they are trying to get readers to want to buy it. RNR is very different to this, as they use a fairly plain browny beige colour, to show that they focus on more earthy, and calming songs and artists, like folk music or the blues. This helps their target audience understand what kind of music this magazine focuses on, and the text above the title only further confirms it.

RNR is most likely trying to go for an older audience than MOJO, and are less willing to take risks with their covers, so they stick to beige, which is a colour that older people generally like. Unlike MOJO, RNR covers less rock music and more country or folk songs. The cover of RNR also has much more tame headlines. For example, where RNR has "These days it's yoga, camomile tea and three Our Fathers", MOJO has "We've been to funerals, We've been to jail...", showing the contrast and different topics these two magazines covers. The CDs that come with the magazines are also incredibly diverse, as while MOJO has a bright green one with a skeleton playing the guitar, saying "This is a call!", RNR has a more calming, plain one, which is beige and has nothing but a Zebra in the frame. The only other thing in this CD is the list of songs, all in very small white text. This is also different to MOJO, as on its CD, it has the songs written in a large font, with a black border and a big red number 15 above it.

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