on the "do a movie" music video
A pre-VMAs ramble
The VMAs are tomorrow night, which gives me the perfect opening to discuss the modern trend of doing a music video that’s just…recreating a famous movie.
I noticed it ten years ago (!) when Iggy Azalea and Charli XCX (who will appear again in this newsletter) released “Fancy,” and the video was an homage to Clueless. They recreate almost the entire movie without adding much, but it makes some sense, as the characters in the movie are “Fancy” like the song says.
It happened again in 2019 with Troye Sivan and Charli XCX’s (toldya she’d be back) “1999,” the video for which had a good concept and mediocre execution. It’s a bop about nostalgia set 20 years ago that references plenty of 90s stuff: Steve Jobs, The Sims, Skechers.
But other than “hey, I remember that,” there’s no POV. What about 1999 was so great? The video doesn’t say.
Plus, and maybe the theme was the era and not the specific year, but I think if you’re going to call a song “1999” and release it exactly twenty years later, this might be an issue…a bunch of the references are not from 1999. TLC’s “Waterfalls” is from 1994, “Say You’ll Be There” by The Spice Girls came out in 1996, Rose McGowan and Marilyn Manson wore the pictured outfits to the VMAs in 1998, and NSync’s “I Drive Myself Crazy” is from 1997.
In fairness, the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” is from 1999, as are two of the movies recreated in the music video, The Matrix and American Beauty.
But the thumbnail is referencing Titanic, which came out in 1997 and is set in 1912. A better reference to Titanic-as-90s-phenomenon might be a moment of Leo Mania, but alas. It’s a nitpick, but it goes to my point that this trend is more about recognizability that specificity. Music videos that engage with movies as iconography, not as their own pieces of visual art with cultural context and layers of meaning. Which is kinda…lame?
(Also, Charli has another, better gimmick: cameos. The music video for “Boys” is a bunch of famous boys. The one for “360” is a bunch of famous girls. Both are fun because all of these people seem like they belong in the same universe.)
The most blatant example of references for references’ sake is Ariana Grande’s video for “thank u, next,” which finds an over-spray-tanned Ari in Mean Girls, 13 Going on 30, Bring It On and Legally Blonde, movies that have nothing to do with each other except that Grande likes them and they’re aimed at a female audience.
I could get behind “famous high school movies” as a motif for a song about teenage feelings (which “thank u, next” is not) or “cool female role models” for a song about growing up (ditto), but this is just four cute movies for a song about Ari’s exes, and okay, she didn’t want to make the video about guys, but…literally, just make this the video for “7 rings” instead and you’re already halfway home.
Mostly, this annoys me because aping other art has seemingly become Ariana’s thing. Here’s her and Liz Gillies recreating a scene from Showgirls:
And Best in Show:
(These are also part of another micro-trend that started with bored B-listers during lockdown that I don’t have time to unpack)
The music video for “Yes, And?” is an homage (?) to a Paula Abdul video…
What “Yes, And?” has to do with “Cold Hearted,” I will leave you all to divine. Not to mention, Paula Abdul was famous for her dancing and choreographed the video below, while Ari set her video in a dance audition because…I don’t know!
And she did it again on the same album with “we can’t be friends,” which follows the plot of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind except when it randomly becomes Sixteen Candles. There are probably more references in here, but, to what end?
.__.
There are artists who engage with recreations in a more meaningful way. Loath though I am to compliment him, Drake has a right to reference Degrassi; he was on the show. There’s a connection — this is part of his journey.
And when Jay-Z re-shot a famous Friends scene with Black celebrities for “Moonlight,” that was commentary. Jay was saying something.
(It’s almost like white artists lazily copy+paste nostalgia, while Black artists actually engage with meaning, but I’m not gonna get into all that.)
There’s also an interpretation of this trend that amid an increasingly cluttered cultural stage where the relevance of music videos is kinda up in the air, young women are desperate to attach their art to stuff you already like simply as branding. Much like the theme-dressing we’re seeing on press tours and archival pulls on red carpets.
But if that’s the case, I wish they’d find a way to make the visuals and the meaning go together better, if only to put some of the focus back on the song.
It’s a strange time! The biggest song in the world for the past two months doesn’t have a music video, just a “visualizer” that is a oner of Shaboozey singing at the camera. Male doesn’t-have-to-dance privilege or an artist proving that the music is enough? I honestly dunno.
Happily, there is a recent example of a song/reference pairing I actually think works well: Sabrina Carpenter’s video for “Taste,” inspired by Death Becomes Her.
This doesn’t bother me for a few simple reasons:
“Taste” isn’t painstakingly shot-for-shot Death Becomes Her
Death Becomes Her hasn’t already been meme’d to death
“Taste” and Death Becomes Her are thematically about the same thing and similar in tone
It works on its own if you’ve never seen the movie. More IYKYK not “looking for nostalgia clicks”
Sabrina already released two videos, that even kind of go together, for the first two singles from her album, and they’re not ripoffs of anything, so I’m just more inclined to give her team artistic cred.
Originally I was going to segue from here into talking about music videos produced specifically for movies, but this is long enough, no? I’ll be back with that next week.
In the meantime,
Lizzie
PS: at the risk of completely contradicting myself, there are a handful of films with enough cool cache and visual recognizability that I think they’d make great music video themes and I kind of can’t believe no one’s done them yet: The Virgin Suicides, Trainspotting, The Breakfast Club, Center Stage, and Save The Last Dance
anyway, watch this:
