Chart-topping artists preserve relevance of visuals in industry
Music videos can define a song. A song could harness that undeniable, No. 1 quality, but it means nothing if the video doesn’t fit the emotion, the weirdness, or the humor. There were shows, even channels, devoted to countdowns of the best videos. Now, that’s so ‘90s.
Some artists and bands, however, are still putting in the effort. They still appreciate the importance of the visuals behind their words. These are just a few, out in the past few months, that have added to a single’s greatness with a video-told tale.
“Carried Away” — Passion Pit
He wipes away of smudge of lipstick at the corner of her mouth, she shoots a cross glare and turns the smudge into a full cheek design. “I’m really sorry. She’s not always like this,” he says to a group of their friends. It all comes crashing down. The music video for “Carried Away” chronicles the tumultuous on-screen relationship of Sophia Bush from “One Tree Hill” and Passion Pit frontman Michael Angelakos. They fall into bed, with smiles on their faces and rescue a stray cat before passive-aggressively bickering over game night, cereal and an at-home haircut. It all leads to question, “Why don’t you just leave?” The video is shot by “Beasts of the Southern Wild” cinematographer Ben Richardson and it shows. It screens like a 4-minute indie film. And the whole plot straddles between cute, quirky and real. The fights are familiar in young love, but the message is sweet: They get carried away, but they make it through.
“Give Me Love” — Ed Sheeran
Sheeran is strange. His songs are strange. They’re love songs, so they relate in the mainstream, but his appeal is in his difference. He weaves stomps and screams and raps into his acoustic throws. “Give Me Love” fits the bill. It is a beautiful song, and reads as another heartache, but the video is a touch more complex. The beginning feels like an ode to “Black Swan.” The featured girl — skinny and fragile and just a little bit broken — pulls a feather from her back, grows wings and plays cupid through a dark city. She connects a lesbian couple with one arrow and inspires a man to grab hold of his friend’s lady. As the song turns to the unconventional, the painful shrieks and broken pleas, the winged cupid falls from a hazy rave to a blood-stained mattress: She’s shot herself with her own arrow.
“Girls” — Santigold
Santigold wrote “Girls” for Lena Dunham’s HBO series. It holds a featured spot on the show’s first season soundtrack. It’s short, just over two minutes, and really just repeats the world “girls” in a wonderful way. Dunham’s series is known to share the complex, sometimes sad, sometimes serious stories of 20-somethings on the streets of New York City. Santigold’s video does the same. It cuts, frame by frame, to girls singing the song around the city: 6-year-olds with rainbow ribbons on their pigtails and older women at the tops of subway stairs.
“Stay” — Rihanna
The song itself is heavy — The lyrics are true, the vocals are stripped and the story is all too real. “Stay” is the second single off Rihanna’s seventh album, “Unapologetic.” It is a song of true love and struggle. She is stuck in a broken relationship, built around a weak-at-the-knees romance. As each lyric is beautifully but painfully sung, it is more and more apparent that this is personal. We know the complicated backstory of Rihanna and her on-again boyfriend Chris Brown, and the song seems to help us all understand why she went back. She sings, “Funny you’re the broken one, but I’m the only one who needed saving.” The video is just as tragically gorgeous as the song — The vulnerability of the piano-driven ballad is a refreshing change from the R&B princess’s usual chart toppers. Rihanna sits in a bathtub, beneath clouded water, with no makeup and a completely defeated expression. It parallels, in a kind of eerie way, the video for Sugarland’s “Stay.”
“King and Lionheart” — Of Monsters And Men
Of Monsters And Men has established a brand. They take you on a trip to a fantasy world — a world where Gothic castles and cloaked giants take a spot in the skyline. It’s post-apocalyptic. The “King and Lionheart” video is directed by WeWereMonkeys, a one-woman production company who also created the band’s “Little Talks” video last year.