Bad romance? How pop stars hooked up with artsy short films

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/15/bad-romance-kanye-beyonce-gaga-art

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The longform music video is a rite of passage for any mainstream recording artist. It says: you have depth. It says: you’ve arrived as a mature thinker and creator, with thoughts on what it means to Be Famous In America Today. It says: people will watch almost 30 full minutes of you intermittently rapping and pretending to date a bird.

Last week, to mark the anniversary of the visual album drop that broke the internet, Beyoncé released Yours and Mine, a short film about marriage, motherhood, feminism, and death. It is, like many longer visual works by pop artists before her, self-indulgent, slow-moving, beautiful, and very, very invested in making sure that you know it is art – which is to say it’s in black and white and features a great deal of slow-motion lyrical dance.

Getting away with a pseudo-intellectual, self-consciously artsy short film is the moment a pop star becomes a pop superstar. Not everyone could pull off a meandering monologue about inner strength accompanied by footage of themselves looking in a mirror. Most people would look ridiculous calling Los Angeles the “Garden of Evil” while dressed like a stripper Virgin Mary. Most people would stop short of “I want to make a film where I clone Jesus and put his blood in a gay man’s body to make an army of clones who also have Michael Jackson’s blood in them.” But Beyoncé? Sure. Lana? Yes please. Gaga? Hit us with your clunkiest imagery and your laziest metaphors, Mother Monster. We’ll take it. We’ll take it all.

In honour of Bey’s addition to the pantheon of pop shorts, here’s a look back at some of our favourite musicians’ filmic meditations on life. All them flaneurs need to listen when auteur is talking.

Beyoncé – Yours and Mine

Queen Bey ticks many boxes with this film: it’s in black and white, as mentioned above, it features soft, meditative vocals over a soft, meditative track where B passes on wisdom accrued from a complicated life, and there are a lot of underwater visuals (a key element in determining whether or not a film is art). It deviates from the others on this list in that it’s generally less about art and more about life, but then there is a protest bit were Beyoncé rests her supple body on a person in a balaclava while she says in voiceover that she considers herself a humanist. #art

Lady Gaga – G.U.Y.

The meaningful water in Gaga’s 11-minute epic takes the form of Hearst Castle’s massive outdoor pool and some kind of underground muscle guy lagoon. This film also features an appearance from another important music film trope: Bad Business Guys. (You know, The Man?) Greedy businessmen literally fight each other for cash while Gaga, a wounded bird, is taken to a gay pleasure palace/clone lab to blend Gandhi, Jesus, John Lennon and Michael Jackson’s blood into the perfect man. Then she and the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills storm the offices of Greed Incorporated, killing the CEOs and replacing them with sexy gay clones, because music is her life.

Lana Del Rey – Tropico

Of course Lana Del Rey’s God is John Wayne. This slow-moving, Valencia-filtered story of the Fall of Woman – from an Elvis and Marilyn-inhabited Paradise to, duh, LA – is Peak Lana: she strips, recites Whitman like she’s reading with one hand, smokes in slow motion, and ascends to heaven above a sprawling, golden field. Is 27 minutes too long to stay interested in what feels like the criminal offspring of a whisky-soaked one-night stand between the Bible and an American flag? Yes. Do I want Lana to recite Howl to me nightly before I go to bed? Also yes. The water in this film is a sensual baptism. USA! USA! USA!

Kanye West – Runaway

As with Lana’s effort, this film encapsulates what makes Yeezy Yeezy. It’s over the top, incredibly stylish, and blind to its own silliness (“Your girlfriend is really beautiful,” a party guest comments. “Do you know she’s a bird?” “No,” Kanye says. “I never noticed that.”). There’s more phoenix/wounded bird imagery, and further disdain for The Man, transformed in this film to “Your world”, the grubby reality we live in that rips the wings of glittering creative phoenixes (ahem) with our fear of the different.