There's been a fair bit of talk about women in music videos lately with Katy Perry calling out pop stars who show too much skin and Lily Allen pretty much starting off her comeback with a song and video about how she is above what people think of her as a sexual object.
It's only fitting then, that we go back and take a look at a video that takes the idea of sexy ladies in front of a camera and gets weird with it - "Can't Shake This Feeling" (2010) by Grum, directed by The General Assembly and Ryan McNeill.
The video starts out innocently enough with some sexy ladies in front of a white cyc. Soon, however, we meet a dude with huge hair and a shit-eating grin. He starts to present these ladies in front of tables of food and then - they start eating that food like they are in a fooding eating contest.
I'm not really bothered by watching people eat so the corn and the marshmallow stuff doesn't really gross me out, but the beans? The baked beans make it real for me, especially the way the woman who is eating them, just letting them get all over her. The baked bean juices are covering her pretty much at one point, with stray baked beans tucked into crevices and stuff. It's just wrong.
Just when you think the video will just escalate to weirder food for the rest of the song, we get an abrupt change. Suddenly there is a dude who can't sleep, sitting in his living room and flipping through the TV channels. He comes across one of the girls in the video who is eating donuts and he can't believe it. We are never explicitly told what is going on, but it's implied that it's his daughter.
The rest of the video is him trying to find his daughter, which he eventually does, busting into the set where the food video is being filmed, and yelling at everyone.
It's obvious that the girls eating food is a weird stand-in for softcore porn - something to make the whole premise more interesting. But you know someone out there actually probably does really enjoy seeing this sort of thing, though not to the extent that it would support and industry as large as what is implied in the video, where all sexual imagery seems to be women eating food.
But in light of the constant conversation that culture in general has about how we objectify women in music videos, this is a piece that I find more interesting than just getting women to come in and ironically twerk while everyone winks at the camera. Instead uses images that are so ridiculously unappealing that they highlight how odd it is to put anyone on display for the pleasure of other people. Not that it's intrinsically wrong, but just that the whole spectacle is strange.
The pivot to the storyline of the father looking for his daughter highlights this pretty well - allowing us to see the machinery of every part of this entire industry built on women eating from the production to the distribution. We even get a look at a lower budget shoot - one guy with a camera filming an uncomfortable looking woman on a couch who is eating a roasted chicken leg.
I don't really think there is a social message intended in this video, but it does expose some of the oddities of how we produce and commodify images that are appealing to people - all through baked bean juice. God damn, those baked beans. Why did it have to be baked beans.
