Before Marvel monopolised blockbuster season and tried to crowbar in some, like, intelligence, you could always count on a mega-budget film experience to sit in front of and unplug your brain.
Thankfully, that kind of gloriously empty nonsense still exists in pop videos and it’s mainly Taylor Swift and director Joseph Kahn’s fault.
First there was 2015’s feminism-destroying Bad Blood, in which every high-gloss “futuristic” scene screams: “The budget for this one video is more than your entire album campaign!”
That was then followed by last year’s dystopian cosplay video ...Ready For It?, which appeared to re-use some of the old Bad Blood sets while borrowing its one aesthetic highlight from Scarlett Johansson’s version of Ghost in the Shell. Worst of all was End Game, in which lavish country-hopping ended up looking like the most expensive (and boring) episode of A Place in the Sun.
Arts Away
Look, we’ve all seen a Bjork video and flicked through a style magazine; we know what constitutes “challenging”, “experimental” and “thought-provoking”. Funnily enough, none of these phrases immediately spring to mind while watching the instantly meme-able video for Christina Aguilera’s latest opus, Accelerate, in which the former hitmaker appears to huff glitter, enjoys a glass of milk like — niche reference alert! — George Galloway in Celebrity Big Brother 2006, and has what looks like translucent icing dolloped on her in a way that might be seductive to lemon drizzle cake obsessives.
Obviously there are bits filmed in black-and-white because all music video directors understand that a lack of colour connotes a lack of ideas, which in turn saves on retouching, which in turn helps with the budget for the album campaign in the long run.
Mates’ rates
Pity the poor extra, slavishly waiting by the phone, ready to walk out of a Costa Coffee at the drop of hat if it means sipping from a red plastic cup in a party scene for a Vamps video. But this is 2018 and extras in videos are now made up entirely of other famous people.
Drake’s recent Nice for What video is essentially a showreel for random female actors and models to practise their various #moods. So we get Issa Rae smiling her way through a frustrating business meeting, Jourdan Dunn filmed in black-and-white looking miserable on a horse, and Letitia Wright seemingly stuck up Battersea Power Station. All while Drake rollerblades in a bomber jacket to a song that bastardises Lauryn Hill’s immaculate Ex-Factor. It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?
What is this puppetry?
Pop stars are busy people: there is original content to upload; other famous people to interview for magazine covers; and Twitter apologies made up of screenshots of the iPhone Notes app to post. So, sometimes a music video is the last thing a schedule will allow, and that’s where things get creative, ie everyone panics.
Ed Sheeran’s latest slightly passive aggressive love song Happier features a puppet rendering of the multi-millionaire, who is in the middle of a world tour, while serial collaborator Selena Gomez used the same excuse for not appearing in a video with Charlie Puth. That must surely have been why Kelela put out the animated, Sims-inspired Frontline video, too, right? Still, both are preferable to the barrel-scraping tour montage video, as showcased recently in Pink’s “will this do?” single, Whatever You Want.
Interpret this
Pop’s current obsession with interpretive dance (see Taylor Swift’s Delicate video) can be traced back to professional recluse Sia and her decision to use a be-wigged child avatar (Dance Moms’ Maddie Ziegler) in her videos. Since then, every other two-bit pop star has tried their supple hand at interpreting feelings and/or emotions via the medium of a crab-like physical contortion.
Sia and Maddie, alongside Florence Welch’s billowy arm gestures, also paved the way for Christine and the Queens, AKA Heloise Letissier, and her slightly more artfully rigid moves. These have, in turn, shown up recently in Dua Lipa’s IDGAF promo, in which Lipa faces off against herself in some sort of besuited dance battle that’s all locked limbs, jagged elbows and — perhaps taking cues from original dance overlord Michael Flatley — fairly blank from the neck up.
