Three Voices Alive Today

In this post, I will be referring to three music videos: Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party,” Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” and Lil’ Kim’s “How Many Licks.” Each of these videos is embedded below along with other references as addressed below.
To say that these videos are different does not begin to explore their relationship to one another. Each of them is from a distinctly different decade, mindset, use of medium, and intent. It is not reasonable to get a complete picture of the world through these brief videos, but they each have validity and merit through different lenses.



The thing that struck me most in Leslie Gore’s video was the conservative nature. It makes sense, of course, on the most obvious layers because things WERE more conservative in that time period. The women are dancing and the male-female partners are grooving with each other in a non bump-and-grind kind of way. But as I watched again, I got to thinking about the medium as well. Video during this time period was beginning to have greater entertainment focus, but it was primarily a one-way street. People put up a message for the audience to appreciate. The role of the music video was part of the approach to selling records, sure, but it wasn’t as commercialized or as branded as it is today. The simplicity of this video then is as much a representation of the times as it is the rigidity of the medium during that time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTpvjNn2BUM FIONA APPLE'S "CRIMINAL"(Embedding Unavailable)

The raw nature of Fiona Apple’s “Criminal” is undeniable. There is a sleekness in the music that keeps it moving forward, but as the story unfolds, it is easy to transition from a warped sense of pity to viewing her as if she’s like a train-wreck that you can’t tear your eyes from. All of the tight shots in this video are in stark contrast to the Gore video, but there are technological as well as stylistic leaps that have been made since that time, and comparing is not really fair or worthwhile. The cuts of her with the other people are all carefully scripted, and the careful control that is shown in the shots is indicative of the control she has over the story she is telling. You get the impression that you aren’t being told everything. That coupled with her sly smiles between the angst make it pretty clear that she only wants absolution from her most recent transgressions; if given the chance, she’d do it all again. After reading the critique of this video, I was glad to have the voyeurism identified because there was something about watching her that felt awkward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBqOFMaIpHc (Lil' Kim's "How Many Licks" Video--Embedding unavailable)


It was hard not to be floored by Lil’ Kim’s video; I was shocked the first time I watched it. It is outside of my normal viewing comfort-zone, so it took a time or two for the rawness to wear off, so I could start to see a message beyond the language and sexual messages. The explicit way she talked about her sexual exploits is quite different from the way Apple showed hers. While Apple used innuendo and transparent symbolism, Kim went straight to it with words and images. The way the videos were shot mirrors this. Where Apple’s video had tight shots with plenty to hide, Kim’s video had wide shots and a variety of people involved suggesting she had nothing to hide and relished in the attention. On a side note, I could NEVER show something like this in class, and it was difficult to consider the text just as a self-journey with the lens I used when viewing the video.

These short reviews on the videos helped me come to the realization that these women are all very different but represent the women of their time. I will go one step further and suggest they simultaneously represent women of OUR time, and that is where some of the heat of pop culture is focused. If we can have women of Gore’s sensibilities, Apple’s conflictedness, and Kim’s sensuality—what does it mean to be a woman today? There are plenty of people who try to categorize us in these neat boxes and paint us in corners based on decades, color, dress, or class, but the joke is on them. Women today are all of these things, but that isn’t the only conclusion. The one that may be too big of a leap is this: there were Apples and Lil Kims in the 1960s, but they didn’t have the opportunity to speak to the world on this kind of a stage. Whether through limits with the technology or limits on what they were ‘supposed to be,’ women in the 1960s were told what they could be. Apple and Kim push the limits of what we can be in a way that we may not want to experience for ourselves; just knowing that boundary is out there is comforting should we ever want to push it.

I was reminded of a few other great videos while watching these. The biggest one that came to mind was “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdYQX8J-FFo (embedding not available). She used the same methods as Apple with tight shots, but she didn’t hide anything with these people. She brought the “fringe” into the light; I argue that she didn’t resolve anything with this video—it was just a passing spotlight on people who feel alone, but it was a start. A text worth considering when using the medium of music videos.