Stressed Out - Twenty One Pilots (Video Analysis)

Stressed Out - Twenty One Pilots (Video Analysis)

Twenty One Pilots are a duo from America, formed in 2009. The album Blurryface, which the song ‘Stressed Out’ is from, was released on May 17th 2015 by the record label Fueled by Ramen. ‘Stressed Out’ was released on YouTube on April 28th 2015. The music video is a concept/performance hybrid, as the band is seen performing at several points, but the focus of the video is on the idea of nostalgia for childhood. The music video for "Stressed Out" was released on YouTube on April 27, 2015, directed by Mark C. Eshleman (Reel Bear Media).

In the video, the duo rides big-wheel tricycles to each other's houses to record the song. They filmed most of the "Stressed Out" video at Josh Dun's childhood home in Ohio. Many members of Dun's and Tyler Joseph's family appear in the video. "Stressed Out" was nominated for Best Music Video at the 2016 Alternative Press Music Awards. The video, with over 610 million views and 3.9 million likes as of September 7, 2016, brought it onto list of most liked YouTube videos, but not the list of most viewed YouTube videos.

Stressed out by Twenty One Pilots is a song about desperately wanting to go back to childhood when you had no real worries “Wish we could turn back time to the good old days” and it amplifies this by The mise en scene as the artists are riding around on tricycles whilst wearing backpacks which would often be associated with children and childhood. So props have been used effectively here to add another reinforce the song’s deep meaning. The lyrics of the song are very strongly linked to the visual images of the video. This allows the point of the song to be illustrated effectively. The lyrics point out the pressure of adulthood – “Out of student loans and treehouse homes we all would take the latter” – but also discusses mental health with the lyrics “I was told when I get older all my fears would shrink, but now I’m insecure and I care what people think”, and also features the character that embodies the singer’s illness, Blurryface. 

Symbolic Code is used to present feeling of nostalgia through the band’s use of props and setting – they play in a bedroom, they use tricycles, and they also have a ‘secret handshake’ that they use at the door. The duo acts like children in the beginning with their secret handshake, and then teenagers by staying in bed while their families shout at them. This is all to link the lyrics of the song and their relation to nostalgia back to the visuals of the video. During the choruses the video shows them actually performing their songs, the first one is in the singer’s bedroom and the second is in the drummer’s bedroom which again links to the idea of childhood as they would’ve played in their rooms.

The video begins in a street with the singer on a tricycle, which maintains the theme of the music video following the journey from childhood to adolescence. The lead singer is dressed in all black with a red hat on, the connotation of the black implies that he is insecure and tries to cover and hide his body with dark colours, whereas the red suggests impurity as red is usually associated with the devil and demons so it is hinting towards the darker side of the lead singer’s character called ‘Blurryface’. This sequence is made up of medium and long shots, and the camera is shaky at several points throughout, particularly when the duo is in the childhood scenes. This could emphasise either the mental illness aspect, as it then continues to the scene in the bedroom, which is more a reference to adolescence. Tyler mentions that the smell “would remind us of when nothing really mattered,” suggesting that he wants to revisit that time. 

He sings, “Out of student loans and tree house homes, we all would take the latter.” For him, adult life loses a childhood innocence that comes with feeling safe from worries. Instead of playing, he must work to make a living and pay his bills. The bridge continues the romanticisation of his childhood by describing times that he as a child would “play pretend.”

However, when there are two beds back to back, the camera is steady and is a wide shot to establish it, before it cuts to a close-up of the singer’s face. There are several long shots to show the duo’s families, with medium close-ups cut between to show their faces. However, during the bed scene the duo can be seen wearing red and their beds are white whereas their family members that are shouting at them wear only black, suggesting that Josh and Tyler’s imaginative world may be more lively and interesting than the real world they are being awakened and summoned to and that their innocence connoted by the white is being polluted by the negativity associated by the family members who wear black. ‘You need to make money,’ is suggesting a social pressure to work and earn an income, which may have lead Tyler to leave his childhood fantasies and fun.

In the music video, two versions of Tyler sing this deep-voiced outro. One version is visiting his childhood home, wearing a backpack, and skipping through his old neighborhood. The other Tyler is perhaps the alter-ego “Blurryface” who has red eyes and sings from a dark room. By showing Tyler singing the outro in both personas, the music video suggests that they are two sides of him. One longs for childhood; the other reminds him that he must work and pressures him to keep from returning to his “tree house homes.” The use of jump cuts when Blurryface appears reflects the fragmented thoughts, feeling and emotions that Tyler is going through which can be linked with the theme of mental illness and instability that constantly appears throughout the video.

The camera angles used are generally from a low point of view or at eye level which could be to reinforce the idea that they have grown up and that they are no longer children despite their desperate longing. The lighting of video is generally quite grim and seems to use a greyscale effect which enhances their resentment of growing up which is a result of their unhappiness. However, it could be argued that the video is simply lit to make it look as normal as possible, as the point of the video is for it to look like the adults are trying to get back to their childhood setting. This changes in the moment when they’re in bed with their families standing around them – which symbolises adolescence rather than childhood; the lyrics “But now they’re laughing at our face saying ‘Wake up, you need to make money’ supports this development. The lighting in that moment is bright and white, and when Blurryface is on screen it is entirely dark but for his face.

The make-up involved in this video is a running theme throughout the music videos and tours to symbolise that his mental illness and the darkness that comes with it is constantly present. Joseph wears black paint on his hands and neck in every performance related to “Blurryface” to help channel the insecurity of the character. The black paint on the hands represents the insecurity about the songs he writes, whilst the black paint on his neck relates to the insecurity of his singing as mention in the lyrics “I wish I had a better voice to sing some better words”. So once again there is a strong connection between the lyrics and visuals of the song.

The video ends on the street again where it started, with the singer dancing down it, though this is as Blurryface with the red eye contacts to indicate this, again representing how his mental illness – an aspect that has made this band popular with young people today – is a constant. Overall the song is very relatable as it is talking about the stresses of growing up and that nostalgic feeling when you smell something from your childhood and I think that this video captures the meaning of the song very well.