Some music videos just seem to, for whatever reason, embody a time period from a whole decade to just a year. It's something about the ubiquity of a music video plus the added element of music which is always tied to a time and place.
So today we're watching a music video that I don't think gets enough credit for being a complete embodiment of the mid-late 1990s: "Torn" by Natalie Imbruglia.
This song (which is actually a cover and originally by a band named Ednaswap) was a major hit in 1997 which should come as no surprise if you were alive and cognizant at the time, but what I find really interesting about this video is how it manages to capture so many of the hallmarks of late 90s style and attitude while still being a single-shot music video where almost nothing happens.
So we can go through our mid-late 90s checklist: Do we have an urban loft-type living environment? Check. Just a slight amount of too much light on the singer's face? Check. Concept that sort of makes sense on the surface but doesn't really make any sense when you think about it too hard? You better believe we got a check on that. The list goes on. The hair/clothing are kind of a gimme but they nail that here as well.
Add the fact that Natalie Imbruglia's public image in the US is so tied up with this song that they literally might be the same entity, and the fact that this video made its way into every little video commerical montage MTV did from 1997 to 1999, and you've got a video that managed to really capture the spirit and sytle of the time without ever really becoming iconic.
And, as an added bonus, there's that great moment in the video where some grip is really struggling with one of the walls that he's tearing away and for a second you wonder if it could fall over and crush him. That wouldn't be very mid-late 1990s, though.
