Music Video Analysis

I chose to analysis the song "What Hurts the Most" by Rascal Flatts. This song was released in 2006 in their "Me and My Gang," so I have been listening to this song for a while. I have always enjoyed Rascal Flatts music and when I was listening to this song I had never fully understood what it meant until I saw the music video. Normally when I listen to songs I don't stop and think about what they are saying and the meaning of the song. It’s helpful though to watch the music videos to help understand what some songs mean. I understood that it obviously was about someone being upset and hurt about losing someone, but I didn’t know what they had fully meant by losing someone. When I was just listening to the lyrics it made it a bit hard to decipher. However, now that I have seen the music video I understand more of the meaning behind why they wrote the song. At first it starts off with a girl crying then lashing out at her dad and screaming at him. It is clear that she is upset and blaming her dad for something. Then as the video goes on, I start to discover more about her boyfriend and how close they were and they spent a lot of time together. Throughout this there are little snip-it’s that she is very upset without him and I start to understand what is going on. They show her alone in class, sitting next to an empty seat and her in tears, at first I just thought that they had broken up and she was just very upset. I don’t start to fully understand the meaning of the entire song until the very end when you see her chasing after his truck and he gets in a car crash and she ends up next to a cross on the side of the road. Then once the video is completely over I started to put all the pieces together of what the song was fully about.

At the very beginning when the girl in the video is screaming at her dad, I later find out that he didn’t approve of her boyfriend and made them break up. The day that he came over and they broke up; after he left her house he got in a car crash and passed away. So she blames her dad for making her break up with him and she is just so upset that her life is in shambles. The video shows a scene of her in the bathroom puking because she is just so sick to her stomach from all of the depression. It shows both of her parents also feeling the pain with her; both of their hearts are broken with saddens for their daughter. Music videos seem to help a lot with understanding the full meaning of songs. With a visual along with audio helps me put the two together and make complete sense of the entire product.