“Feeling Myself” allows Beyoncé and Minaj’s talent to speak for itself, and in turn is a much more engaging and entertaining video than any of those more over-the-top productions. People like “Feeling Myself” not because they’ve been convinced to by an assault of pre-release promotion, but because it’s really damn good. There’s certainly something to be said, in an age when MTV has long since given up on playing music videos and most clips debut with little fanfare or recognition, Swift successfully worked her teeny tuchus off promoting and drumming up interest in “Bad Blood.” I think there’s something more interesting to be said about the Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj garnering just as much attention for a video they dropped with no promotion on a streaming service most of us can’t access. It was weird-but not exactly the good weird that is “Feeling Myself.” After it finished airing-on network television, to boot-Swift took the stage to soak in the applause for the clip, a sort of sci-fi orgy of starlets in leather catsuits channeling The Matrix. When the “Bad Blood” video finally premiered, it was as the much-ballyhooed kickoff to Sunday night’s Billboard Music Awards on ABC. This went on for so long and included so many seemingly random people, that honestly I kept refreshing Swift’s Instagram account to see what role I’d be playing in “Bad Blood.” I had to have been the only person left not cast. Swift’s incessant promotion of “Bad Blood” in the lead-up to its Sunday night debut bordered on maddening, with the star sharing photos on social media of all the celebrity friends of hers who would be making blink-and-miss-it appearances in the clip. It’s certainly worth noting the significance of the “Feeling Myself” release so close on the tail of Taylor Swift’s release of her “Bad Blood” music video. Those massive videos with lots of hype, special effects, and cameos by every famous person in the world- ahem-they’re big-budget manifestations of crippling insecurity. It’s fitting that the message of “Feeling Myself” and the ensuing video basically just heralds the confidence of two of music’s fiercest performers, because it takes a lot of confidence to execute something as understated as this. Still, it’s a refreshing reprieve from the culture of excess and shamelessness that’s taken over the world of music videos in pop music lately. Pulling off a video like this requires a painstaking amount of work and planning, even if it’s meant to come off as gritty and haphazard. Beyoncé dances around the house with a glass of wine in her hand? I do that! Can I, too, be Beyoncé? We can all be Beyoncé!ĭon’t be mistaken. The homegrown, DIY aesthetic of the clip appeals to fans because of the relatability of it. It’s a smart idea in the age of glaringly overproduced, loud, and bombastic music videos. It’s another example of that Beyoncé-perfected thing, where she makes an obviously carefully orchestrated and complicated video shoot come off as casual improv. “Feeling Myself” is in the vein of Beyoncé’s semi-recent “7/11” video. Is that Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj playing with water guns in a kiddie pool? And, oh my god, chowing down on hamburgers? How weird! How fabulous. In one frame, there they are tooling around under a highway street sign that says “Coachella.” In another, they’re baking in the kitchen. It’s a montage of the two artists vamping for the camera, a slideshow of look-at-me-I’m-fabulous scenes that are as visually stunning as they are seemingly random and unstaged. In the video, Beyoncé and Nicki, basically, don’t do anything. “Feeling Myself” is a single of Minaj’s latest album, Pinkprint, with Beyoncé’s involvement presumably the returned favor for Minaj guesting on the remix for “Flawless.” The song itself is a superb example of catchy nothingness, featuring traded swagger between two of music’s most ferocious lyric-spitters, centered around a satisfyingly braggadocio chorus that has the pair repeating that they’re “feeling myself.”īased on that, the video, released by surprise a day after Taylor Swift’s own exhaustively promoted clip, is perfect. And the fact that you can only watch it if you pay for Tidal, well, it’s just so good that it might actually be worth ponying up the cash. Shrewd move, guys! The video is excellent. If you’re among the few paid subscribers to Tidal, you were gifted today with exclusive access to the duo’s new music video for “Feeling Myself.”
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