“Her looking had grown up.”
Mark Cousins, The Story of Looking.
The music video has always captivated me.
The idea that life was a great story to be lived first entered my subconscious thanks to the music video. Pop and hip hop videos to be exact. This was the first narrative medium to fully enliven in me a sense of intrigue and passion.
Recently I’ve been thinking deeply about the experience and impact of romantic connection. In the midst of my musings, I’ve realised that my affinity for music videos growing up meant certain types of images and story arcs often intertwined with my earliest perceptions. While remembering what it felt like to receive that material, it’s also occurred to me how much my tastes and ideas have expanded after a couple decades’ worth of life experience and maturation.
We all know that life experiences help shape us. Often weaved together with other images and scenes we see from a younger age, they inform our viewpoints, the metaphors we cling to that help us articulate our feelings, and the way we process life’s events.
Hence I’ve been keen to pen my own reactions to just a few special musical video stories that have said one thing or another to me about romantic journeys, at two stages of my life so far. Starting from the earlier years…
One of my favourite filmmakers, Diane Martel, directed Christina Aguilera’s Genie In A Bottle video. For me, and I guess for many other fans who consumed it at that time, its appearance on TV provided three-and-a-half minutes of pleasing escapism. As soon as the first chords sounded and the sunset appeared on screen I would dive right in.
The story was simple, but alluringly dreamy.
Indeed, much of the cookie-cutter pop of this era leaned into and accentuated similar aesthetic styles, both visually and sonically.
Skip a couple of years back to when Mariah Carey glamourised what it might feel like to rescue oneself back into the arms of a sweet, sweet love. In Honey, directed by Paul Hunter, she sings of an already matured attachment. In the action of the story, her character seems to enjoy the thrill of a chase that threatens reunion. And in the euphoric ending, this reunion does happen as deliciously as already expressed.
The scenes are cinematic. To my young eyes they were fascinating and the drama was thrilling. Watching it all – the comedic moments and slick dance number included – my lingering thought was that in addition to love stories ending joyfully, you could expect the journey to feel upbeat, exciting, and fun.
Fast forward to adulthood, where the range of visual stories that hold my attention has expanded. Take The Roof, another video directed by Martel. While released off the same album as Honey, I discovered it around the late 2010s.
Mariah reminisces over a past love in this video, and we see her attempting to recreate the physical and emotional sensations she felt while this connection was still alive.
Responding to a question about this project, Martel once shared through Instagram that her note to Mariah when shooting the bathroom scenes in particular was that she “be playful” as if getting ready to meet a new guy. To imagine and feel into the “newness” and “excitement” of the anticipation.
But throughout her solitary moments in this video, even when her character is recalling a joyful moment, Carey’s eyes betray an emptiness that seems to have taken root, something that’s easier for us to perceive in the intimate close-ups.
The video touches me by focusing my attention on the fact that beautiful romances may end. Martel’s work also emphasises the complicated nature of our remembering them. In this story and for many people, the sweetness and sorrows that arise with these memories don’t just coexist; they also tend to beget and amplify one another. Sadness is then inextricably tied to these meaningful chapters.
Going further back in time, I’m struck by how solemnly Sade Adu depicts a fairytale protagonist on a mission to reunite with her lost love.
My chest often hollows as I watch these scenes. I also imagine how life-altering her romance must have been to have sparked such resoluteness. To the point where every place and object in her world become tools for keeping her body and hope alive, and eventually achieving a happy ending.
Her pursuit at first feels like an inspiring tribute to devotion. But at the same time, the dreariness of the above-water setting alludes to hopelessness. On top of that, when I take a step back to consider her goal more abstractly, I wonder: Will this love still even exist in the form she remembers it by?
The passage of time – the unknowns of the ‘before’, what could eventually occur in the ‘after’ – is crucial, and I frequently feel invited to consider it when I watch art such as Muller’s. In this case, a story that combines emotional realism with fantasy so stunningly.
In the final video I’ll speak to, the protagonist does locate his love in the spiritually desolate streets of New York City.
In many ways, Charles Stone III’s visual story for the Roots’ classic track You Got Me seems disconnected to the song’s message. But in this video I watch a man whose pensiveness seems so consuming that it could only have been driven by a paranoia similar to what’s being discussed on the track.
Additionally, the melancholy of the music connects finely to the video’s scenes. Rapper Black Thought gave the following commentary on the work:
“To me, the image of people sprawled out, laying down in the streets represent the percentage of the population that is unconscious, not really walking around with their eyes open to what’s going on around them.”
Black Thought, 1999 (Source: MTV)
And yet, the only thing his character seems awake to is his partnership and its future prospects.
Later, when Black Thought unexpectedly finds his love lying lifelessly on the ground, he stops narrating and joins her. The scene then changes in a plot twist, and Black Thought is now the only one that’s down. We see the neighbourhood in mayhem around him, the scene soundtracked by Questlove’s jungle-inspired drumming. One key takeaway I get from this story is how insidiously certain factors outside of our nucleus may cause our togetherness to fall apart, and ultimately break our connections.
These musings, most of them pretty sombre, don’t represent my full range of thoughts and questions. But what they signal to me is my greater awareness of the complexities of our emotional journeys. And in particular, of how we might carry those emotions through or towards romantic connections, or away with us if a relationship ends.
It’s my respect for this complexity at an older age that meant my eyes could recognise and take in the beauty of these latter videos in the first place, and continue to do so.
Now, I can appreciate how pacing might be used not just to enhance fantasy, but to also draw our hearts closer towards the truth of an emotional experience. Or how cinematographic choices may help deliver the sentiment behind actions and interactions, in addition to creating visual drama.
From there, as proven by this very piece, I can enjoy exploring a wider range of music video narratives and the potential meanings behind them. Whether the director’s intention was to deliver a message, create an atmosphere, evoke a deep-rooted emotion, or all of the above or otherwise.
Or I might simply watch, receive, and feel.
– Rinu
Sources
Mark Cousins, The Story of Looking, (Great Britain, Canongate Books, 2017), p.91
Diane Martel [@dianemartel_] Instagram stories (2021, June 26) https://www.instagram.com/dianemartel_/
Christina Aguilera – Genie In A Bottle (Official Video), directed by Diane Martel. Source: Sony Music Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIDWgqDBNXA
Mariah Carey – Honey (Official 4K Video), directed by Paul Hunter. Source: Sony Music Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3KOowB4k_k
Mariah Carey – The Roof (Back In Time) (Official 4K Video), directed by Diane Martel. Source: Sony Music Entertainment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi5oxzttjgo
Sade – No Ordinary Love – Official – 1992, directed by Sophie Muller. Source: Sony Music Entertainment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WcWHZc8s2I
The Roots – You Got Me ft. Erykah Badu, directed by Charles Stone III. Source: Geffen Records https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCHeEQV454
Music video director Sophie Muller on making the things you’d want to see. Interview by Hannah Ziegler, 2021. The Creative Independent https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/music-video-director-sophie-muller-on-making-the-things-youd-want-to-see/
What’s your metaphor? Kim Hermanson, 2022. The British Psychological Society: https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/whats-your-metaphor
The Roots Send Wake-Up Call To “Unconscious” Population. MTV, 1999. https://www.mtv.com/news/03lpi3/the-roots-send-wake-up-call-to-unconscious-population