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Fuse: How Beyoncé Made the Video of the Year
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Explosions! Hyenas! High heels in the sand! Beyoncé has made one of her biggest and boldest videos ever with the new “Run the World (Girls).” And with 21 million YouTube views in just a week, the gamble has definitely paid off. Director Francis Lawrence has stockpiled it with a combination of everything we love about music videos circa 2011. So maybe our love for the clip is less about Beyoncé and more about the temperature of the era? Either way, we’d put the damn thing in a time capsule if we could. Here’s why:
1. It’s everything we wanted the Britney videos to be
It’s almost as if Beyoncé and director Lawrence were reading blog entries about Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me” video as advice on what not to do...Conversely, the most instantly memorable image in “Run the World” is Beyoncé doing a tricky, impossible choreographed singing-and-dancing routine—courtesy of longtime choreographer Frank Gatson, Jr. Best of all, it peaks with a nine-second shot with no edits. For the music video generation, a nine-second shot (in something that isn’t an OK Go video, that is) is usually poison. It’s, in fact, the rapid editing of music videos that had been setting the tone for a generation of quickly edited TV commercials and films. After 30 years of that, a slow, meandering gaze can bring down the energy of even the most syrupy song. But that defiance of our expectations helps make this shot downright electiric. From 1:32 to 1:41, Beyoncé pulls off a moonwalk, a jog, a half-Charleston, a dramatic drop to her knee, a lift up and a couple of sneering hops while the camera refuses to blink. Not only evocative, the shot basically leaves no room for conspiracy theories or questioning: This is Beyoncé, she does her own stunts.
2. It's everything we love about Gaga videos too:
Beyoncé even has Gaga’s eye towards modern art—just this year New York’s MoMA had a performance from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker where she creates similar symmetrical patterns in the sand as Beyoncé in the “Run the World.” As a bonus, Beyoncé even cops some pointy Gaga-esque polygon jewelry (though Beyoncé’s glove in the “Single Ladies” video is a pretty obvious forebear) and some version of those Alexander McQueen lobster shoes. She even pulls off daring crucifixion imagery without having to devote a whole “Judas”-style video to it.
3. It’s got that post-apocalyptic feel the kids like
Don’t think we missed the Mad Max feel, a trend still going hellastrong after we wrote about it in November. Instead of loading it with Nintendo controllers and American junk (like My Chemical Romance’s “Na Na Na”), she and Lawrence looked towards Africa. Hell, if you’re going to start over, why not go back to where humans began. The video is full of dancing inspired by the pantsula dancing of Mozambique’s Tofo Tofo (who appear in the video) and Beyoncé gets a lot of use out of that Cleopatra-style headdress. It’s an untapped visual aesthetic added to a popular trope.
4. Girls really do run the world!
Females are making the best videos in 2011, full stop. This video might be the end game for a year that already includes Lady Gaga’s back-to-back run of the visually sumptuous “Born This Way” and the brash “Judas.”Not to mention Katy Perry creating a trippy sci-fi universe all her own in “E.T.” and Adele deftly turning a breakup into an art instillation “Rolling in the Deep.”
And while big budget videos like Britney’s “Hold It Against Me” and Rihanna’s “S&M” are not without their problems and goofiness, they’re still fearless and weird and risk-taking and waaaymore exciting to watch than the motionless “Roll Up” by Wiz Khalifa, or the cheesy new age bluster of Chris Brown’s “She Ain’t You,” or the Hallmark-gone-YouTube sentimentality of Patrick Stump’s “Spotlight (Oh Nostalgia).” It’s a golden age for women in video, and this “Run The World”—artistically challenging and politically minded—may just be its spokesperson.
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